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ROMANTIC AMERICA 




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ROMANTIC AMERICA 



BY 

ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER 

AUTIIUR OF "KOJIANTIC GERMANY," "SCUM O' THE EARTH," ETC. 



"To cast out the passion for Europe 
by the passion for America." 

It. W. Emerson. 



ILLUSTRATED 







PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO. 
NEW YORK MCMXni 



El (^2 



Copyright, 1913, by 
The Century Co. 

Copyright 1912, 1913. by 
The Metropolitan Magazine Company 



Published, October, 1913 



©CI.A357364 



TO 

HENRY VAN DYKE 

TEACHER AND FRIEND 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I Pbovincetown, the Heaht of Cape Cod ... 3 

II The Spell of Old Vieginia 33 

HI The City of Beautiful Smoke 71 

IV Mammoth Cave 99 

V Yellowstone Park 134 

VI Among the Old California Missions .... 161 

VII The Yosemite "Valley 192 

viii The Grand Canyon . 225 

IX The Creole City of New Orleans 249 

X The Open Ro^vd in ]SIaine 279 

XI Unique Mount Desert 308 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado Frontispiece l^ 

From a painting by Maxtield Parrish 

PAGE 

Commercial Street 10 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

An Old Church by Sir Christopher Wren 10 ^^ 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Along the Wharves 19i^ 

From a painting by Anne Bosworth Greene 

The Dune Country 24!^ 

From paintings by Anne Bosworth Greene 

Ebb-Tide on the "Risin' "—Bringing up the Catch 29 l^ 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

One of the Wharves 29 i/ 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

A Little Lane 29 / 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Shirley, from the Garden 36 '^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

The Pigeon-House 36 *^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

Westover, before Its Restoration 41 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

The West Gate 41 •* 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

The Former Dining-Room 41 »^ 

From a drawing by Harrj- Fenn 

Brandon 48 k 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

The Dining-Room 48 ^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

Jamestown Island 53 U^ 

From a drawing by F. H. Marvin 

Old House at Williamsburg 53 '- 

From a drawing by F. H. Marvin 

Duke of Gloucester Street and Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg . 59 
From drawings by F. H. Marvin 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FAOE 

The Powder Magazine at Jamestown a Generation Ago 63 ■/ 

From a drawing by Harrj- Fenn 

Old Church Tower at Jamestown, before the Island's "Improvement" 68 
From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

Where the Allegheny (at the left) and the Monongahela Join to Form 

the Ohio 74, V 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

The Peninsula and the Skyscrapers 79 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

The Cliff Dwellings 86 / 

From an etching by Earl Horter 

A Reminder of an Old-World Cathedral City 91 '^ 

From an etching by Earl Horter 

The Edgar Thomson Steel Works 96 i/ 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

Entrance 105 ^y 

From a painting by Andr^ Castaigne 

Echo River 110 / 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Mammoth Dome 115^ 

From a painting by Andr^ Castaigne 

Chief City 123 ^ 

From a painting by Andr^ Castaigne 

The Star Chamber 130 ^' 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Beyond Ultima Thule 130 ^ 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Emerald Pool 139 V^ 

From a painting by Anne Bosworth Greene 

Looking down the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone 139 v^ 

From a painting by Anne Bosworth Greene 

Old Faithful 144 ^^ 

From a painting by F. Jay Haynes 

(Reproduced by courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway Company) 

Yellowstone Falls 149 "/ 

From a painting by F. Jay Haynes 

(Reproduced by courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway Company) 

Yellowstone Lake 154 » 

From a drawing by Anne Bosworth Greene 

Interior of Carmelo (San Carlos) Mission, as Stevenson Saw It . . 163 v 
From a painting by Henry Sandham 

Carmelo before Restoration 168 v 

From a drawing by Henry Sandham 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAOE 

San Gabriel 168 >^ 

From a painting by Albert Herter 

San Diego 171 >^ 

From a painting by Albert Herter 

San Luis Rev 175 

From a painting by Albert Herter 

San Juan Capistrano 175 k^ 

From a painting by Albert Herter 

San Fernando 180*^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

San Luis Rey 180*'' 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

Original Chapel, San Juan Capistrano 180 t^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

The Garden, Santa Barbara IS-t 1^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

San Buenaventura 189 ^^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

Pulpit 1 89 t^ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

Confessional 189 i/ 

From a drawing by Harry Fenn 

Yosemite Walls 193 ^^ 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

The Half-Dome 198 ^' 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

The Evening Bonfire at Camp Curry 203 ^ 

From a drawing by Anne Bos worth Greene 

Foot of Yosemite Fall 208 ^ 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

The Royal Arches 213 »/ 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

Yosemite \'allej' from Artists' Point 219 • 

From a painting by Anne Bosworth Greene 

A Rift in the Walls 224 ^^ 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

A Storm Passing over the Canyon 229 1/^ 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

In the Glow of Sunset 234 "^ 

From an etching by Joseph Pennell 

Mists in the Canyon 243 "* 

From a painting by George Inness, Jr. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAOE 

Decayed Magnificence in Toulouse Street 251 » 

From a drawing by Joseph Pcnnell 

A Creole Courtyard 256 

From an etching by Earl Horter 

Old French Quarter— a Typical Street 259 >/ 

From an etching by Earl Horter 

A Creole Kitchen 266 V 

From an etching by Earl Horter 

The French Market 269 "^ 

From an etching by Earl Horter 

The "Picayune Tier" as It Was 274 / 

From a drawing by Joseph Pennell 

A Cemetery Walk (tombs and "ovens") 274 / 

From a drawing by Joseph Pennell 

The Old Burial Church 274./ 

From a drawing by Joseph Pennell 

The Levee To-day 277 ^ 

From an etching by Earl Horter 

The Maine Coast 281 7 

From a painting by Winslow Homer 

A Mount Desert Headland 286 v 

From a painting by E. W. Kingsbury 

Cliffs near the Ocean Drive 289 ^ 

From a painting by E. W. Kingsburj- 

The Water-side, Castine 296 V 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Monhegan Harbor 296 V 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Lane in Camden 299 V 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Camden Harbor 299 V 

From a painting by Henry Guy Fangel 

Bar Harbor, Showing the Bar 310 

From a painting by E. W. Kingsbury 

Green and Dry Mountains, from Otter Creek SIS * 

From a painting by E. W. Kingsbury 

Mount Desert, from Cranberry Island S20 

From a painting by E. W. Kingsburj' 

Jordan ^Mountain, from Seal Harbor 323 

From a painting by E. W. Kingsbury 

Jordan Pond and the Bubbles 827 ^ 

From a painting by E. W. Kingsbury 



INTRODUCTION 

THIS adventurer into the literary offing has made so 
bold as to hitch his bowsprit to a star. He modestly 
desires to be a sort of new Columbus and discover to 
the twentieth century the real romance of what old Christopher 
found in the fifteenth — the romance, obvious or hidden, upon 
which so many globe-trotting Americans now turn supercilious 
or unsuspecting backs. 

There is need of such a venture. By some strange chance 
the mysterious, thrilling, romantic elements of the American 
scene have never been compressed between a pair of covers 
since Bryant compiled "Picturesque America" and illustrated 
it with wood-cuts for the delight of a former generation. We 
have had many volumes about the poetic charm of Asia, Africa, 
Europe and the South Seas, but too few about that of the land 
which is, in many respects, the most romantic of all. "The 
whole country," writes the brilliant author of "The Spirit of 
American Literature," "is crying out for those who will record 
it, satirize it, chant it." 

The word America is now so generally used as abbreviation 
for "The United States of America," that my title needs no 
apology. The outside of the book suggests the inside, and thus 
fulfills the chief end of covers. Its four scenes epitomize 
America's four main varieties of romance. The first is that of 
rugged coasts, quaint colonial harbors and out-of-the-world 
islands rich in legends and "originals." 

The second kind of romance is the most distinctivelv Ameri- 



INTRODUCTION 

can. It lies in the glamour of an industrial civilization new to 
the world. Colonel Roosevelt, who knows his America back- 
ward and forward, is convinced that — next to the Grand 
Canyon — Pittsburgh is our most impressive sight. And 
Arnold Bennett believes that if Balzac had seen 'the city of 
beautiful smoke' he would have roared in a mighty voice: 
"Give me a pen!" 

The scene in the Spanish mission typifies many a charmed 
spot where the Old World — doubly picturesque by contrast — 
lives on in the New. We sometimes forget that the hoary 
ruins and manors of Tidewater Virginia, the half-deserted 
Georgian villages of New England, the Little Paris of Creole 
New Orleans, all belong to us as truly as Hoboken or Oshkosh. 

The large view of the Yosemite Valley typifies our wealth of 
wild nature. Last year the American people spent sometliing 
like two hundred millions in seeing Switzerland. We still 
know next to nothing of our OAvn more splendid Sierras. We 
grow enthusiastic over small French and German caverns, yet 
remain ignorant of the stupendous underworld of Kentucky. 
We make pilgrimages to the colored terraces and geysers of 
New Zealand, yet will not pause on the way home to see 
whether Wyoming does not hold in trust a more astonishing 
museum of natural marvels and beauties. We scramble among 
Himalayan gorges without realizing that deep in the bosom of 
Arizona there waits the supreme vision. 

In this book the spots most characteristic of these four kinds 
of romance are visited in the order which a pilgrim to them 
would naturalh' follow if he set out from New England. The 
volume hopes to ajipeal alike to the traveler and the stay-at- 
home. It would persuade the young victim of Wanderlust to 
see America first, and the veteran wanderer to see America 



INTRODUCTION 

last. It desires to burnish the memories of the man whose 
roving is done. To the recluse it hopes to bring some sort of 
substitute for the look and feel, the somid and human atmos- 
phere of Romantic America. 

R. H. S. 



ROMANTIC AMERICA 



ROMANTIC AMERICA 



PROVINCETOWN, THE HEART OF CAPE COD 

CAPE COD wears its heart on its sleeve; and wears 
it like a Christian on the very end of its sleeve in 
lieu of a fist. For where the arm of earth gathers 
protectingly about Cape Cod Bay, and its fingers 
enfold a harbor of a thousand ships, there is concentrated in a 
league of shore, village and dune the quintessence of the Cape's 
beauty and romance and dear, naive humanity. 

ProvincetoAvai is the natural climax of the Cape. You work 
up to this climax from Plymouth, past the quaint town halls, 
meeting-houses, fan-light portals, water-mills and wind-mills 
of places with such well-flavored names as Sandwich (where 
the Cape proper begins), Barnstable, Hyannis, Yarmouth, 
Harwich, Chatham, Wellfleet and Tioiro. You cross wide- 
swelling uplands from which you may look down, as at a map 
modeled in relief, upon the curve of the Cape's gold and green 
and wine-red arm, and see how the stacklike towers of the wire- 
less station are like a bit of Pittsburg that has strayed by acci- 
dent to spotless climes; and notice how the sand-spit out toward 
Proviiicetown gleams like a horizontal exclamation point of 
gold. 

How suitable in many ways this exclamation point is, you 
learn on reaching your destination. The Platte River in Ne- 
braska is said to be a mile wide and an inch deep. Hardly 
less remarkable are the dimensions of Provincetown. It is 
three miles long and averages little more than a stone's throw 



4 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

in width. It is a mere hand's breadth of civilization wedged 
between insatiate devils of sand dunes and the deep sea. It 
reminds one of the Tyrolese village of Klausen — a single street 
wedged between a beetling crag and a brawling river. And, 
like Klausen and jewels and women, Provincetown demon- 
strates how little charm has to do with mere bigness, in being 
one of the most purely romantic towns that we can boast. 

The main street, especially in the moon's limelight, is almost 
too good and un-realistic to be true. The theatrical way which 
the houses occasionally have of jutting their upper stories 
out toward the opposite neighbor is pleasant to eyes fresh from 
metropolitan brownstone fronts. They remind one of old 
salts, perched on coils of rope and almost bumping foreheads 
in order to swap yarns. Such over-shot architecture is a 
favorite in the theatre, if for no more spiritual reason than 
that it economizes floor space. And when one has sauntered 
the length of this thoroughfare and prowled the wharves that 
make one-half of its back yards; when one has admired the 
big, bronzed, curly-haired athletes of Portuguese fishermen 
who cluster about Railroad Wharf, and their daughters of the 
graceful movements and soft voices and large dusky eyes; 
when one has heard the i^avement musical with a language that 
appears to have taken its eclat from France and its music from 
Italy, a music that is echoed even on the signs in names like 
Silva, Lucas, Corea and Cabral, — the conviction comes that 
one is attending some romantic drama with the scene laid in 
an untraveled corner of southwestern Europe. And one in- 
stinctively strains his ears for the prompter's whisper, and his 
eyes for a canvas castle in Spain poised on a dune in the back- 
ground. 

Parts of this street are pure bits of Portugal. Newly ar- 
rived immigrants recognize the fact with glad surprise. And 
conversely, Portuguese-Americans who visit their ancestral 
shores find them reminiscent of Commercial Street. Mary 
Heaton O'Brien writes that "a little Provincetown bov once 



PROVINCETOWX 5 

landed at Ponta del Garda at St. ^Michael's, and he looked 
around at the handsome, dark-eyed children and the sailor men 
loafing at the water-front, and the signs on the shops, and his 
comment was: 

" 'Why, this is just like home!' 

"And no wonder, for it is from the Azores that the first 
Portuguese immigrants came. ^More than fifty years ago 
Fayal, Flores, Pico, St. Michael's began sending their hand- 
some, clean-blooded people to us, and have been doing so 
ever since." 

The least alluring thing about this chief artery of travel is 
its name. Even in the most foreign stretches, the name Com- 
mercial Street reminds one of the austere, practical Puritans 
who founded the place and whose descendants still keep alive 
in rather more than one-half of the population the essence of 
Anglo-Saxondom. Indeed, Dr. Palfrey the historian declares 
that for the first two centuries of Provincetown's existence, un- 
til the comparatively recent immigration began, the blood of 
its people was more purelj' English than that of the inhabi- 
tants of any English county. 

Their blood is still unmixed. And part of the unique at- 
traction of Commercial Street lies in the contrast between its 
purely Portuguese and its purely colonial asjiects. Where 
else is one to look for sights like these? A knot of fishermen, 
oil-skinned, heroic in stature, with fierce black moustachios 
and crimson neck-cloths that bring out their swarthiness the 
more, gossips lazily before the fan-light and lozenge panes 
of a pillared colonial facade. Beyond, one discovers a beach- 
ful of boats resplendent in the primary colors beloved by the 
Latins, set off against one of those rotting fragments of 
whanes, which is now a mere kaleidoscope of gawdy Portu- 
guese fish-houses, but which, only a centun,- ago in Province- 
town's prime, used to entertain a dozen American whalers. 

You may meet with another of these contrasts by going to 
a Thanksgiving party at that jiride of Commercial Street, the 



6 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Town Hall. There on one floor American dances are in prog- 
ress, while on the other the precious opportunity is offered of 
watching the "Charmelita" and other dances of old Portugal. 

Or suppose that you wish to see a typical Provincetown in- 
terior. Framed by a rose-trellised doorway, a dim-eyed 
daughter of the May flower peers under her octagonal glasses 
and welcomes you with the hospitality of an age long vanished. 
She welcomes you even though you may not have been pre- 
sented to her. For no stranger who stays more than a cou- 
ple of days out of season in Provincetown can remain wholly a 
stranger to its friendly folk. She conducts you over her house, 
and you find everything almost as you once knew it in the 
home of your New England grandmother: hair-cloth sofa, 
stiff, substantial furniture, antimacassars, pewter table service, 
rag mats, monumental family Bible, wax flower-pieces under 
glass domes, huge firejilaces, with cranes, trivets, toasters, tin 
ovens, foot-warmers, candle-molds, skillets, and all the other 
indispensables. If the house cherishes the most severe and 
venerable Cape traditions, you maj- even be rewarded with the 
sight of framed coffin-plates in the parlor. 

Next door you enter a dwelling even more richly colonial. 
A black-eyed, bronze-cheeked woman in a yellow kerchief re- 
ceives you with no less hospitality than her Anglo-Saxon 
neighbor has shown. But, with almost a sense of shock you 
realize that the interior of her dwelling has lost touch with 
the exterior. After all these years you have now at length 
arrived at the inside of your castle in Spain, and begin to 
comjn-ehend that the rule for enjoying such edifices from the 
outside and at a considerable distance may sometimes be safely 
relaxed. Behold, Puritanism has well-nigh vanished, and in 
place of the hair-cloth, the coffin-plates and the family Bible, 
one corner of the parlor has been transformed into an altar- 
niche for the holy Virgin, while a statue of that saint who pro- 
tects the mariner in his hour of need usurps the site of the 
waxen flower-piece. 



PROVINCETOWN 7 

Commercial Street had an origin in keeping with its pres- 
ent nautical air and appeal to the imagination. The town 
originally stood on the spit of sand far out across the harbor, 
where the lighthouse now is. ]Many years ago, in order to 
protect the harbor from the threatening sea, the government 
bought Provincetown, houses and all. Then the Province- 
tonians went to the government people and asked what they 
were going to do with the houses. 

"Pull 'em down, of course," said the government. 

"Can't we have 'em?" inquired the late owners. 

"Sure," replied the government, "if you '11 take 'em away." 

"Sure!" echoed the Provincetonians. 

Old sea-dogs that they were, they applied their technic to 
the problems of house-moving. They bulk-headed their dwell- 
ings up, necklaced empty casks about them in the way of life- 
preservers, and one sunny morning the village of Provincetown, 
true to its maritime traditions, set sail, school-house and all, 
and came floating gailj' across the harbor to where it now 
stands. Near tlie railway track to-day they point out a cer- 
tain store as the original sea-faring school-house. 

With such a past no wonder that the dwellings of Com- 
mercial Street smack as a rule of tar and brine. At this small 
end of the Cape, it is impossible to get far away from the sea, 
even in the arts of decoration. Whale's bones, ships' mortars 
and the like are used to enliven not a few front yards. One 
veranda is adorned Avith a wooden figurehead. This was 
picked up at sea in 1867 by the owner's father when on his 
way home from Africa, under the impression that it was the 
body of a floating maiden. The image is presumably that of 
a mermaiden, but as it had to be amputated at the waist in 
order to be stowed in the vessel's hold, this point must always 
remain in dispute. 

Commercial Street is at its best after a light, wet snow- 
storm, when every twig shows "inch-deep with pearl" as if on 
purpose to set off the pillars and portals of the houses, while 



8 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

harborwards every rope and net and string of corks is picked 
out still more dazzlingly against the blue waters. The huge 
trees that form so characteristic a part of the Provincetown 
picture must owe their size to the tropical earth from which 
they sprout. For it is a fact that every cliild who first sees 
the light in Provincetown is born on South American soil. 
This is the explanation. In its palmy days the town pos- 
sessed a bottom consisting so entirely of sand that almost noth- 
ing would grow there, and the people put their houses on stilts 
in order that the sand might blow underneath and not bury 
them. So the local fleet that engaged in the fruit trade used 
to bring home as ballast whenever it could, loads of rich trop- 
ical soil. Hence the giant willows, some of which measure 
more than sixteen feet around the trunk. Hence too the 
vivid lustiness of the gardens bursting with holly-hocks, sweet 
peas, marigolds, bachelor's buttons, sweet-williams, nastur- 
tiums and old maid's pinks. 

The houses appear to have made it a point of honor to stand 
in any other relation to Commercial Street rather than parallel 
with it. Some even turn their backs quite upon it to remind 
us of the days when the beach was the sole thoroughfare, and 
when a Provincetown girl could be recognized anywhere on 
the Cape by her deft way of flicking the sand out of her low 
slipper with a staccato little side-kick. When, about 1838, the 
l^lank M'alk was built out of Provincetown's share of the memo- 
rable division of the national surplus, the enterprise was de- 
nounced by the more conservative citizens as a wanton piece 
of extravagance. What had been good enough for their fath- 
ers to walk on, they declared, was good enough for them. 
Some even vowed never to use such a decadent luxury. They 
were as good as their word and continued steadfastly to the 
day of their death to plod "up along" and "down along" (as 
the phrase still runs) on the beach, a mode of travel that re- 
quired — and received — much sand. 

To my mind the chief attraction of Commercial Street lies 



PROVINCETOWN 11 

in the variety of its views. On the one side there is a succession 
of shm, hill-chmbing lanes varied with ghmpses beyond of the 
mysterious country of the dune-deserts. On the other hand are 
innumerable vignettes of the harbor and of the enthralling 
fisher-life that begins in every harborward yard and overflows 
into every vacant lot. Cold weather is apt to find in the latter 
rows of Portuguese sailing craft, cradled for the season, whose 
colors, probably crude enough when originally applied, have 
taken on a strange attractiveness from communion with the 
elements. The reds now smack of coral and of the hues of rare 
fishes; the verdigris greens have borrowed tones from marsh- 
grasses, seaweeds and calm waters ; the blues have a soft velvet- 
like quality, blent of misty morning skies, and depths like those 
of the azure grotto of Capri. If only one might see them 
perched thus against a simmier harbor fluttering with white- 
winged craft! One almost regrets that in the summer they 
slip their earthly moorings and become white-winged them- 
selves. But what the land then loses in likeness to a painter's 
palette, the harbor gains in likeness to a rainbow sea with sails 
for white-caps. 

From the landward side of Commercial Street flow the lanes. 
Their sinuosities and wliimsicalities betray their abbreviative 
origin and show how long it must have taken them to rise 
from being mere short-cuts "across lots" into the dignity of 
streethood. Some of them are so narrow that wagon hubs have 
to take care not to groove both fences at once, and others are as 
purely pedestrian as the lesser ways of Venice. Though you 
wander as far inland as these lanes lead, the salty tang still 
persists. Whales continue to adorn yards and ridgepoles. 
Festooned seines do duty for chicken-wire. And almost 
anywhere one is liable to catch neat vignettes framed by 
gnarled willows or towering elms of a sheet of olive bay 
crowded with "bankers" and "flounder-dredgers" and dread- 
noughts riding inmiaculately at anchor. 

There is room merely for a word on the ancient foundations 



12 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

that were discovered more than a century ago a score of feet 
below the surface of Chip Hill. ^lany believe that these are 
the remains of a Viking house or fort, although the archeolo- 
gists, for paltry botanical reasons, are now trying to rob the 
Cape of its proud trust that it is the original "Vinland" of 
Leif Ericson. The learned gentlemen will have to grow in 
grace and eloquence, however, before they can convince some 
of us that Thorwald, the Viking, did not grind up the shells 
that furnished lime for the cement in that mysterious fireplace 
down in jNIrs. Paine's cellar. 

The architectural interest of Provincetown is not confined 
to its quaint houses. The churches aye well worth looking at, 
especially that of the Universalists. This is easily the finest 
colonial church on the Cape, if not in New England. Its per- 
fectly balanced tower forms the aesthetic center of town; and 
it is hard to understand why the building is so little known. 
Its appeal is understood by any one who takes the present 
minister's word that it was built from original designs by no 
less an architect than Sir Christopher Wren. 

On a hill behind it stands the Pilgrim IMemorial INIonument, 
the corner-stone of which was laid by President Roosevelt. In 
1910 it was dedicated by President Taft on the anniversary 
of the sailing of the Fathers from Southampton. This monu- 
ment emphasizes the only half-appreciated fact that the Pil- 
grims made their first landing in the New World, not at 
Plymouth, but at Provincetown, and there drew up and signed 
that compact which marked the beginnings of civil hberty in 
America and was the first written constitution known to mod- 
ern times. In the words of President Eliot's fine inscription 
over the doorway, the Pilgrims "established and maintained 
on the bleak and barren edge of a vast wilderness a state with- 
out a king or a noble, a church without a bishop or a priest, 
a democratic commonwealth the members of which were 
'straightly tied to all care of each other's good and of the whole 
by every one.' With long-suffering devotion and sober reso- 



PROVIXCETOWX 13 

lution they illustrated for the first time in history the principles 
of civil and religious liberty and the practices of a genuine de- 
mocracy. Therefore the remembrance of them shall be per- 
petual in the vast rejjublic that has inherited their ideals." 

The monument rises more than two hundred and fifty feet 
high, and is a gray granite edition of Siena's famous "Torre 
del ]\Iangia." Because it is Italian and not colonial, it has 
had to endure no end of criticism. But who ever heard of a 
lofty colonial tower? I, for one, do not feel that tliis Latin 
character is much out of key in a monument to the late dis- 
coverers of Columbus' continent, set in a town whose jjeople 
are almost half Latin, and which is growing Latiner every 
day. Compared with the fitness of Jamestown's Egyptian 
obelisk, it is a model of all the congruities. 

And the monument, as a matter of fact, has proved versatile 
enough to be in sympathy both with the Puritan and the Portu- 
guese aspects of Provincetown. Sometimes it is bleak, aus- 
tere and grimly deterrent enough to express perfectly the 
character of those whose adventure it commemorates. At 
other times, particularly in a heavy mist, or as seen at sun- 
set or by moonlight up some glamourous lane, its slim, turret- 
croA^aied height is as romantically Latin as any of the fisher 
folk who are crooning their folk-songs down there on the 
crumbling jetties. 

Not least among the attractions of the town is its human- 
ity. 

"When first I came to live in Provincetown," a well known 
v.Titer said to me, "the place seemed to radiate out from the 
Sir Christopher Wren steeple. But now it seems to radiate out 
from the man in oilskins and sou'wester who is carrjang a cod 
home for supper by the tail." And Provinceto^vn has achieved 
one of the rarest of all character combinations. It is at once 
virtuous and interesting. A few years ago a writer in that 
cynical sheet, the Xew York Sun, remarked: "If there are 



U ROMANTIC AMERICA 

any better people on the earth, no one has mentioned the fact 
... In the Town Hall is a lockup, but the only persons 
who get into it are the visitors who want to see it. . . . The 
butterflies and dandies stop at Orleans, so the people of 
the town are the Xew Englanders of two hundred years 
ago." 

If he had said "the Anglo-Saxon people of the town" he 
would have been almost right, for their blood is pure and en- 
gagingly consen'ative. Sometimes in the speech of the most 
venerable, one maj' still catch the idioms of two centuries gone. 
It gives one a new kind of pleasure to overhear the talk of 
two bent and retired whalers, meeting under the shadow of 
Sir Christopher Wren's steeple: 

"Mornin', Peleg, how's you'ms?" 

"We 'ms pretty fair; how's you'ms? Hed yer brakfest 

yit?" 

This good old dialect is unfortunately yielding all too 
rapidly to Provincetown's increasing contact with the modern 
world; and it is to-day oftener heard in the more isolated fast- 
nesses of the Truros. 

There are no braggarts at the tip of the Cape. Folks there 
have a horror of letting the tongue's reach exceed its grasp. 
Before delivering any statement they weigh it with care and 
then cut off a large piece, much as the butcher cuts the bone out 
of a steak. This habit of lingual moderation is typified by the 
answer of the old "accommodation" driver who was asked if he 
had ever been a sailor. "No," he said. "No, I never followed 
the sea none to speak of. Oh, when I was young I done some 
fishin'; I went on a few whalin' voyages — perhaps a matter o' 
eighteen year in all ; but I would n't say I 'd ever done much 
fishin\" 

In an age of imitative over-sophistication it is refreshing to 
sojourn among such forthright, simple, naively original people 
as the Provincetonians. They are never afraid to look at the 
world out of their own eyes. It is related of one substantial 



PROVINCETOWN 15 

citizen that, having been to New York and seen Bougereau's 
canvas called "Nymphs Bathing," he referred to it as "a picture 
of a feller with deer feet and two women who were trying to 
make him take a bath" — wliich is surely as plausible an inter- 
pretation as any yet offered. 

It is very meet and very right that Provincetown should be 
the only American community to retain its town crier. Almost 
any day you may catch the clang of his bell and see him pass, 
clad in a sort of blue jerkin and chanting something or other 
with an indistinctness that must be de rigueur for such func- 
tionaries everA-vvhere. He made me think again of Klausen 
across the seas, whose night watchman used to cry the hours in 
a jumble of ancient rhyme which took me some attentive weeks 
of insomnia to unravel. Perhaps, however, it were as well not 
to pry too curiously into just what it is that the picturesque 
figure proclaims. It is said of an early incumbent of his office 
that, having been exhorted to cry more clearly, he passed 
through town enunciating the following with considerable dis- 
tinctness: 

"Table-wax and sanctuary! The entertainment will con- 
clude with a roaring hearse entitled: 'Honey on Both Sides.' " 
This pronouncement was his official rendering of the notice: 
"Tableaux and Statuary. The entertainment will conclude 
with a roaring farce entitled 'Done on Both Sides.' " 

In response to his friendly invitation I called upon the senior 
town crier, ^Ir. George Washington Ready. 

"I am eighty-one years old, sir," he said, "and my wife here 's 
just turned of ninety. ]My father was a Dutcliman and my 
mother was an Englishman, so that makes me a true American, 
don't it? I 'm an old salt, sir. I 've been in every port of the 
known world where a vessel would draw twenty feet o' 
water." 

Then for an hour !Mr. Ready regaled me right royally with 
narratives of whaling, sailing, battle, murder and sudden death 
in the seven seas — with tales 



16 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

"of most disastrous chances; 
Of moving accidents by flood and field ; 
Of hairbreadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach," 

and other matters no whit less interesting. He described in 
detail the wreck seven years ago of the Jason, and its .burial 
beneath the flowing sands of Wellfleet. "Yes, sir," he ended, 
"and that was the very transport wliich took troops from Bom- 
bay thirty year ago to the bombardment of Alexandria. I was 
quartermaster of her. Five pun a month." 

With real emotion he led me to the best room and exhibited 
with tender pride a model of the Jason that he himself had 
carved out of the wreckage as a sort of memorial monument to 
the ship he loved. Each part had some special association. 
The hull, he said, was made of deck jilank from the captain's 
stateroom ; the sails, from the door of the mate's room ; the bow- 
sprit and the life-boats were none other than the mate's teak- 
wood writing desk from Cocliin Cliina which had suffered a 
sea-change. 

Not a little about folk-character is to be learned from the 
study of a people's signs, though one scarcely knows whether 
it is conscious humor, or unconscious that displaj^s on the fence 
of a cow-pasture the notice: "Hens Keep Out;" that pla- 
cards a mastless motor-dory with the legend "For S^ul"; or 
that places in the window of a barber-shop the startling sign: 
"Honey in Comb," while within one reads in large char- 
acters: "Please Loaf in the Back Room." A certain 
bakery advertises "ISIellefluous Ice Cream," and this deli- 
cacy is familiarly referred to about town as "the melle- 
fluous." 

The exuberant satisfaction of a certain cottager in his situa- 
tion is evidenced by a sign running across the entire edifice, pro- 
claiming: "J,. Rogers" Delight Delight Delight," And 
in a pool-parlor where Portuguese men are fond of sitting over 
their cards, a goodly placard states: 

No Gajibling Allowed 



PROVINCETOWX 17 

This, no doubt, in deference to its Puritan environment. 
But, all righteousness having thus been fulfilled, a smaller sign 
on the other side of the card table euphemistically urges the 
l^atrons : 

To Avoid Mistakes 
Settle At End of Each Game 

One of the finest Old World customs which our immigrants 
have brought to this country is the festival of the Nativity, 
called Menino Jesus, which the Portuguese of Provincetown al- 
ways celebrate with ferv^or. During Christmas week there 
stands in a corner of their best rooms, an altar-like affair, with 
little steps leading up to an image of the Christ-child which is 
often of great antiquity, and has been brought from the family's 
former home in "The Islands" as the most precious of its lares 
and penates. Saucers and shells full of earth, from which 
sprout spears of growing wheat, are spread symbolically on the 
lower steps. A small band of instrumentalists appears and 
arranges itself in front of the altar (just as I have seen the 
quaint fiddlers of Sicilian Syracuse do at the time of the Xas- 
cita) and plays and sings old Portuguese Christmas carols. 
Wine and goodies are then handed about until the advent of 
the next band of musicians. The houses are open to any who 
choose to come during all of Christmas night, and most of the 
time until after the new year. It is to be hoped that the drj' 
light of hard-headed American reason will not quench the radi- 
ance of this sweet old custom. Certainly we could provide it 
no more congenial home than a community with a Sir Christo- 
pher Wren steeple and a town crier — a town, moreover, that 
is yearly becoming more and more the haunt of painters and 
writers and all other lovers of simplicity, beauty and mystery. 

For the region is particularly rich in the last-named quality. 
Xot long ago one of the resident artists said to me: "There 's 
more mystery about the country around here than about any 
other place I was ever in; more queer and whispery and sug- 



18 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

gestive sights and sounds and sudden changes." This was in 
particular reference to the hinterland of Provincetown proper, 
the amazing dune country that stretches three miles to the life- 
saving stations of the dangerous back shore. 

These dunes are the arch enemies of the town. They are 
forever changing, forever new, forever advancing to bury Prov- 
incetown in their dry lava much as Vesuvius buried Hercu- 
laneum. Now they creep forward, stealthily, imperceptibly; 
now, hurled by the brawny arm of a "nor'-wester," they fall 
headlong upon, and bury from sight, some forest of pine and 
oak only to resurrect the poor tree-corpses in the next gale. 
They are as treacherous and sinister as quicksands, but with 
more initiative. The one remedy is to sow beach-grass and 
evergreens, anchoring the dunes with myriad frail roots. Thus 
life in Provincetown means one persistent, never-won cam- 
paign against the encroaching billows of sand on the one side, 
and on the other, against the billows of water, which have been 
known to encroach clean across Commercial Street, and turn 
the bulk-heads into kindling. 

And yet, these dunes, with their variety, and the poetry* of 
their colorful, undulating forms, constitute the most amusing 
natural attraction of the place. I remember going once into 
the back country after a heavy January gale and finding it ab- 
solutely unrecognizable. Old things had passed away ; and be- 
hold, all things had become new. What had been, the day be- 
fore, a group of sturdy maples, was now a bland, bald-headed 
dune. On the neighboring knoll I burst through six inches of 
sand to find three inches of snow beneath. And digging 
brought further alternate layers of sand and snow as though 
they were the alternate cake and cream of what the Germans 
call a "sand-tart." Not far distant was a rise from which 
radiated a perfect miniature desert, bordered on everj^ hand, 
as though it were Selkirk's monarchy, by the sparkling line of 
ultramarine which divided earth from heaven. 

Further along I found nothing less than a toy Sahara, en- 



y 








^-' 



i 



' ''•-I*-* 



Al.oNc nil w iiAi;\ I .> 



PROVINCETOWN 21 

alped and gone quite daft, near sand cliffs, ribbed and eaten 
away over night into a vest-pocket edition of the Grand 
Canyon. And beyond the ridge was a veritable wind-brook 
with well-defined banks and pebbles, a meandering current, 
and even water-plants, all whittled out of sand by the idle 
wind. 

In season this back country ministers as bountifully to the 
body as to the spirit. Here whortleberries, black and blue, 
flourish with the wild cherry and the beach-plum. While in 
the neighboring woods grow quantities of wild strawberries as 
well as the delicious juice pear, or "Robin Cherrj-," peculiar to 
the Cape. 

Among the dunes one is apt to meet with all sorts of un- 
canny sights, the heavy air and the perfection of the dwarf veg- 
etation combining to make the distances most deceptive. To 
any one who has become accustomed to the wide sweeps of Col- 
orado or of the Arizona deserts, one of these hollows only a few 
hundred yards across actually appears at times like an expanse 
running to mesas thirty or forty miles away. This effect is 
capable of carrying such conviction that vessels occasionaUy run 
aground under the impression that the land is far distant. * The 
illusion may even deepen to actual mirage. The credible 
Thoreau tells of three different mirages that he saw m this 
topsy-tur^-y region. 

To such atmospheric treachery is partly due the basis for 
the saying that there is not a foot of shore sand in this vicinity 
that has not been pressed by the keel of some wrecked vessel. 
In the sands do^-n toward Wellfleet there is still to be found 
an occasional King William and Queen ]Mary's copper, and the 
kind of Spanish dollar that used to be called cob-money. 
These are souvenirs of one shipwreck of such essentially ro- 
mantic flavor that Stevenson must have read about it before cre- 
ating "Treasure Island." 

In his musty old historj^ of the ^lassachusetts Bay colony, 
Governor Hutchinson tells of the notorious pirate Bellamy 



22 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

•who, in 1717, was decoyed to his doom on this shore by the 
captured captain of a now obsolete craft called a "snow." 
Bellamy had promised to give back the snow if the captain 
would pilot him safe into the harbor. But the good captain, 
fearing that the pirate meant to plunder Provincetown, hung 
his lantern in the shrouds just as a violent stoi-m arose, and 
hugged the shore, with the pleasing result that Bellamy's whole 
fleet was wrecked and many of those pirates who were not 
drowned were executed by the town fathers. 

The most Stevensonian part of this pirate tale, however, 
may be read in the yellow pages of Alden's "Collection of 
Epitaphs." 

"For many years after tliis ship^\Teck, a man, of a very 
singular and frightful aspect, used, every spring and autumn, 
to be seen traveling on the Cape, who was supposed to have 
been one of Bellamy's crew. The presumption is that he went 
to some place where money had been secreted by the pirates 
to get such a supply as his exigencies required. When he 
died, many pieces of gold were found in a girdle which he con- 
stantly wore. Aged people relate that this man frequentlj' 
spent the night in private houses, and that, whenever the Bible 
or any religious book was read, or any family devotions per- 
formed, he invariably left the room. This is not improbable. 
It is also stated that, during the night, it would seem as if he 
had in his chamber a legion from the lower world; for much 
conversation was often overheard which was boisterous, pro- 
fane, blasphemous, and quarrelsome in the extreme. 

"This is the representation. The probability is, that his 
sleep was disturbed by a recollection of the murderous scenes 
in which he had been engaged, and that he, involuntarily, 
vented such exclamations as, with the aid of an imagination 
awake to wonders from the invisible regions, gave rise, in those 
days, to the current opinion that his bed-chamber was the re- 
sort of infernals." 

The beauty of this back country is even more appealing than 




I 



I III'. 1)1 m; I (11 N 1 i;v 



j 



PROVINCETOWN 25 

its curiosity and variety. Both figuratively and literally it is 
a desertful of jewels (for an analysis of the sand has discov- 
ered seventeen different kinds of stones, including jasper 
topaz, tourmaline and amethyst). In autumn, from a ridge 
on the way over to the Race Point Life-saving Station, you 
may look down, either way, upon scarlet maples and golden- 
brown oaks, and straight ahead, over an expanse of tawny 
sanded tree-tops, to a knoll of pure, smooth gold that dips at 
one end affording a glimpse of the sea where it gleams palely 
against a background of softly rolling clouds. 

Though the form of the dunes varies with every passing 
hour, the seasonal coloring of their more fertile borders is "the 
same, yesterday, to-day, and forever." And one may still 
enjoy among them the same pleasure that Thoreau enjoyed 
and expressed in the crowning passage of his book on Cape 
Cod. 

"Notwithstanding the universal barrenness, and the con- 
tiguity of the desert, I never saw an autumnal landscape so 
beautifully painted as this was. It was hke the richest rug 
imagmable spread over an uneven surface. . . . There was the 
incredibly bright red of the huckleberry, and the reddish 
brown of the bayberry, mingled with the bright and living 
green of small pitch-pines, and also the duller green of the 
bayberry, boxberry and plum, the yellowish green of the 
shrub-oaks, and the various golden and yellow and fawn-col- 
ored tints of the birch and maple and aspen,— each making 
Its own figure, and, in the midst, the few yellow sand-slides on 
the sides of the hills looked like the white floor seen through 

rents in the rug This was a part of the furniture of Cape 

Cod. We had for days walked up the long and bleak piazza 
which runs along her Atlantic side, then over the sanded floor 
of her halls, and now we were being introduced into her bou- 
doir. The hundred white sails crowding round Long Point 
into Provincetown Harbor, seen over the painted hills in front, 
looked like toy ships upon a mantel-piece." 



26 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

One of the best places from wliich to gain a comprehensive 
view of Provincetown is from the summit of one of the near- 
by dunes "way up along." I remember going there once in 
what the consen-ative tongued natives would have called "half 
a gale," and finding a sand-storm that stung as though each 
several grain had been specially heated by a malign providence. 
The storm literally "stood me uji" against it and filled me with 
sympathy for the life-savers who patrol the beach in all weath- 
ers and sometimes have to dig their wav into the station at the 
journey's end. But no sand could mar the appreciation of 
Provincetown's three goodly little towers, grimly presided 
over by the granite of the JNIonument. Eastward, over giant 
Avillows, were the whitecaps and sliding purple shadows of tlie 
harbor, full of fugitive schooners, with the fleet of "dredgers" 
scudding in from the Hyannis grounds. A revenue cutter 
swung gallantly at anchor, backed by the arm of the Cape with 
its golden cliffs. While southward the sun, bursting from 
clouds that raced across the clear-washed blue, turned the sur- 
face of the Atlantic to a silver shield. 

There is one part of Provincetown even more interesting 
than the dune countrj', and that is the water-side. A local 
painter once remarked to me in painter's vernacular: "Do 
you know, this kind of wharf stuff is none too common in Amer- 
ica. You get a little of it at ^Marblehead and Gloucester, 
but those whan^es have n't the same fishy feel to 'em that these 
have." 

Hours at a stretch I used to haunt Eno's Fish jNIarket wharf, 
upon the jutting ends of which the tooth of time has made 
many a royal meal. It is half strewn with sheds in various 
rusty red and yellow stages of dilapidation, and the balance is 
dedicated to the declining years of pensioned lobster pots. It 
is festooned with fish nets, studded with finely-patined casks 
and coils of tarry, salty rope, with rude derricks and cankered 
anchors that have outlived their prehensility by a fluke. 

Memorable, indeed, are the prowlings to be made in and out 



PROVINCETOWN 27 

of the wharflets "up along." There one may see the apotheosis 
of litter. The reaches of the "risin'," as the slope of the beach 
at ebb is familiarly called, are littered with a whole rainbow of 
dories to which oil-skinned men are lugging tarry cables and 
tubs of trawl. The roofs of the gay fisher shanties are littered 
with softly lighted seine corks. Peer within and you see a 
Rembrandtesque obscurity from which emerge excited young 
Portuguese blades unconsciously striking noble attitudes over 
the casks that sen-e for card tables. The harbor is littered with 
the canvas ridges of the motor-dories, the labyrinthine cordage 
of schooners and the hulks of awkward coasters among which 
the gale digs up clouds of spimie and spindrift that scud like so 
many wraiths out beyond the anchorage. And even the base 
of the bluffs beyond is littered with the wliites and greens of 
shore ice. 

You prowl on and admire the Latin feeling for design which 
shows, for example, in the way that fish are nailed up to dry 
under the eaves of the sheds so as to make an ornamental frieze. 
You make friends with the crowds of thoroughbred cats that 
haunt the headquarters of the fish supply; and learn on inquiry 
that Provincetown's unusual feline opulence is due to the fact 
that as the cat is the favorite ship's pet, selected specmiens 
have been brought home time out of mind bj^ connoisseur cap- 
tains from all parts of the world. Those plump and silken 
creatures, their descendants, are now a standing object lesson 
to man of the importance of eugenics. 

This water line is also a famous place for ducks and gulls, 
and has been from of old. For as long ago as the days of the 
Pilgrims, their chronicler reported, "there was the greatest 
store of fowle that ever we saw." Vocally the gulls are even 
more in evidence than in New York Harbor, and their piercing 
reiterations sound now like a troop of refractor}' and repining 
faucets, now like a chorus of Park Row auctioneers. 

I formed the habit of wandering down the "risin' " whenever 
the ebb coincided with the sunset, in order to see the "catch" 



28 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

l^itchforked out of the dories into carts to the accompaniment of 
sonorous Portuguese poetrj^ and prose. Then I would follow 
the carts up to the long outstretched town with its huge knotty 
willows, its gables and belfries, and wharv'es flushing gradually 
under the gaze of the west. And later, in the light of the gaso- 
line flares, I would watch as if fascinated the knives of the 
cleaners flashing about in shambles of fish houses deftly per- 
suading pollock and haddock and cod to perform miracles of 
hari-kari among fish-tubs that looked like the red lacquer of 
Japan overlaid with mother-of-pearl designs in dried fish scales. 
And the talk I heard was no less interesting, despite the fact 
that at certain emotional crises, it offered what Sydney Smith 
would have called "rather too close an imitation of that lan- 
guage which is used in the apostolic occupation of trafficking 
in fish." 

Perhaps no other Provincetown sight can quite equal 
the drawing of the weirs, those lanes of net ending in traps 
which are of supreme importance as the local sources of bait, 
and into which is liable to wander overnight anything from a 
school of squid or herring to a shark or a young whale. 
Thus, drawing the weirs always holds in store some of the 
excitement of opening a prize package, or delving for Cajjtain 
Kidd's booty, or raising a Spanish galleon. But the predomi- 
nant interest is always human, bred of the keen competition for 
bait in combination with the hot, vivacious Southern blood of 
the fishermen. This ceremony, however, would hardly appeal 
to the more pampered type of tourist. 

It is like no other experience with which I am acquainted 
to tumble out well before a January dawn, walk beneath snowy 
willows a-glitter in the moonbeams down to a fisher shanty and 
draw on oilskins and hip boots while listening to the light- 
hearted and really witty banter of your Portuguese comrades 
in the quest. You plod out upon a long wharf, down five 
yards of vertical ladder, find a dory with your feet, and stand 
in snow and slush while they row out to the weir boat, upon the 




EBH-IIDEON THE •■KISIN'"--BKINt;IM} IP HIE (.AIIH 





ONIi OK HIE WHARVES 



A LITTLE LANE 



t 



PROVINCETOWN 81 

highest part of which you perch, and admire the ghtter and 
mystery of the town's long water line. 

You start, and from every part of the harbor comes the 
sharp chug-chug of fisher-craft converging on their goal and 
racing for position. The weir boat alone enters the weir and 
your comrades begin to purse up the great net. Along the 
outside of the circular weir-wall, gunwale to gunwale, range 
forty motor-dories, bristhng with eager, swarthy faces, sur- 
mounted by sou'westers, and surmounting heroic oilskinned 
frames. Some have neck-cloths of ruby or vermilion, or 
lemon-yellow. Some sit jauntily astride the bows of their 
boats with arms folded upon the top of the net. Some are 
snowballing, some stealthily manoeuvering for position in the 
hope of eluding the weir-captain's eye. All are joking; but 
all are tense with the need of bait. 

One prow rips a gash in the wall. Instantly the captain is 
dancing upon the deck and, in the moderate phrase of his good 
wife, is "almost using bad language" to the culprit, who, erect 
and defiant on his prow, challenges the universe to wreak its 
worst upon him. 

The emotional tempest gradually subsides as it comes to be 
known that the villain is quite innocent and that it was an- 
other boat wlaich accidentally tore the weir. Meantime the 
pursing process has kept on until life now stirs visibly within 
the narrowing compass. The excitement grows. A hideous 
imp of a goose-fish comes grinning and gasping to the surface. 
You look down over the heaving shoulders of the crew into a 
struggling mass of cod and skates, flounders and pollock and 
sea-cucumbers, with a single squid writhing its tentacles among 
them and striving to cloud the issue by the hackneyed old ex- 
pedient of emitting ink. 

The silver sides of herring glint below, alas ! too few, as you 
can read on the disappointed faces staring down over the wall. 
And as the living treasure is scooped and pitchforked aboard 
the bidding begins. 



32 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

"Fi' dollars a basket! Let 'em come!" bawls a giant with 
pockmarks. 

"Six dollars!" shrieks a rival. 

"Seven!" roars another, "let 'em come!" 

It turns out that there are only five basketsful of herring. 
"What are these among so many?" And nothing but a vig- 
orous repulsion of boarders saves the weir boat from being 
swamped by the frantic bidders. 

Then up comes the sun, showing between level clouds only 
a flat lozenge of carnelian, but spreading a roseate splendor 
over the struggle, and touching with a wistful beauty the far 
profile of Provincetown. 



II 

THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 

NO pilgrim to Provincetown and Plymouth Rock 
should lose sight of the fact that this country had 
two cradles. And after he has surveyed the grim 
old oaken, Puritan cradle that once rocked danger- 
ously "on a stern and rock-bound coast," he should remember 
the older, more graceful Cavalier cradle, woven of magnolia 
boughs, and go to see where it used to swing on the verge 
of destruction to a lullaby blent of war-whoops, the groans of 
starving settlers and the voice of the rippling James. 

One drops down by steamer from Richmond, the head of 
navigation, where the pioneer colonists reported that "the 
water falleth so rudely and with such a violence, as not any boat 
can possibly passe." Before long the stream broadens out and 
makes one realize how truly the James can boast itself one of 
the three great rivers of our eastern seaboard. This region 
of "tidewater Virginia" is easih' the most fascinating and char- 
acteristic part of the Old Dominion. John Fiske calls it "a 
kind of sylvan Venice," and explains that the easy navigability 
of its streams has delayed the building of roads and railways 
and thus has "tended to maintain the partial isolation of the 
planters' estates, to which so many characteristic features of 
life in Old Virginia may be traced." 

To float do^^^l the James is to pass through a country com- 
l)aratively wild. One is scarcely ever out of sight of wild 
geese, ducks and turkeys, of sora, eagles or those superb avi- 
ators and propagandists of disease, the buzzards. During my 
stay at one of the great manor houses down the river, an Ameri- 
can eagle measuring six feet from tip to tip was shot in a 

33 



34 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

certain tree on the lawn where a wild turkey had met his fate 
a week or so before. At Brandon, all the while my hosts were 
showing me the garden, their beagles were melodiously run- 
ning a hare. We could see the little creature doubling on his 
tracks or hiding in the roses or the box. Once he made a 
dramatic get-away by leaping high over the back of a pursuer. 
And in a field nearby I drove in five minutes within killing 
distance of four enormous flocks of wild geese. Indeed, the 
abundance of the geese led a few years ago to a tragedy. The 
captain of a tug shot his rifle at a floating flock. His bullet 
skipped on the water, entered the window of a house that was 
half concealed by the riverside trees, and killed a baby in its 
mother's arms. 

The absence of railways along the river has also probably 
preserved many a name of colonial flavor, like Ducking-stool 
Point where once were baptized, for the good of their souls 
and the cooling of their tongues, those "brabbling women" who, 
as the old chronicles complain, "slander and scandalize their 
neighbors, for which their poore husbands are often brought 
into chargeable and vexatious suits and cast in great dam- 
ages." 

Isolation has also had some slight influence on language and 
customs. This is the country where the verj' first famihes 
leave off the final g's of such triflin' words as "nothin' "; and, 
by way of compensation, insert y's before their a's, saying 
"cyard" and "Cyarter" for "card" and "Carter." Here you 
stand behind your chair to say grace before meat, and sit down 
to such characteristic refreshment as mint or brandy juleps 
and spoon bread. And next morning before you rise, a quaint 
pickaninny comes in to make you a fire on the huge hearth and 
entertain you with the earliest news of the plantation. 

As the good steamer Pocahontas swings do^\Tl the stream 
her various points of call deserve the attention of a weather eye 
and a hearing ear. For, as in pioneer days, the life of each 



II 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 37 

community focusses itself on the wharf whenever a boat turns 
her prow that way, and offers a fascinating study in Virginia 
types. It is hard, too, to take one's eyes from the negro deck- 
hands who handle their trucks with the true southern darkey's 
grace, and cake-walk up and down the gangway with genial 
abandon and in the j oiliest rhythms. 

South of IMason and Dixon's line strangers become ac- 
quainted without difficulty. If you care to, you can soon be 
on friendly terms with everybody on the boat. " 'Quainted 
'long this way?" is the usual and adequate form of auto-intro- 
duction when two perfect strangers sit down together. And 
in two or three minutes, as likely as not, visiting cards are 
passing, together with assurances to the effect that " 's pleasure 
to know yuh, suhl" 

If the pilgrim is fortunate enough to be provided with the 
necessary letters of introduction he will break his journey for a 
day or two at one of those oldest and rarest colonial estates of 
America which constitute almost the chief attraction of the 
James. Soon after the founding of Jamestown in 1607 the 
dissatisfied settlers moved up the river one by one and founded 
these huge plantations for the cultivation of tobacco. Three 
of them remain supreme in importance: Shirley, Westover 
and Brandon. Of these, Shirley is the most genial and 
"homey," Westover the most elegant, elaborate and imposing, 
Brandon the most romantic, filled most with the atmosphere of 
the great days gone. 

Landing at the Shirley wharf I presently came in sight of 
what seemed like a small village. But it turned out to be only 
the "home-acre" of a representative James River plantation, 
handed faithfully down from pioneer America. In an open 
quadrangle stood the barns, dairy, belfried smoke-house, log 
granary, dove-cote, kitchen and storehouse, the two latter ivy- 
smothered and united by a hedge of box. The house flanked 
the river-ward side of the group, which was all one mellow glow 
of seventeenth ccnturv brick. 



38 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Daffodils were scattering largesse among the hackberries 
along the shore. There I lingered, enjoying the well-balanced 
facade of Flemish bond, the chimneys, ample, square, with bold 
cornices, and the perfectly i^roiJortioned porches with their 
Tuscan columns. These recalled a story which a down-river 
planter on the boat had told me. "I once thought of building 
my son a house near the Shirley estate," he had said, "so I wrote 
to the Ladies' Home Journal asking for advice about good 
colonial house designs. And the Ladies' Home Journal re- 
plied that the best example of the colonial style in America was 
to be found on the James River in Virginia at a place called 
Shirley." This was something like the episode of Dr. S. Weir 
MitchelFs going incognito to consult a Parisian nerve special- 
ist and being counseled by him to hasten home and seek the 
advice of a certain eminent Philadelphia doctor named Mitch- 
ell. 

Above the ancient estate of Shirley was breathed a magic 
atmosphere that made appropriate the presence of three or 
four lusty specimens — crimson with berries — of that "gentle 
tree" beloved by the fairies, the holly, j:\jk1 it was also in 
keejMng that many of the old window panes added a decora- 
tive note of color with an iridescence like that which the soil 
of Cj'iJrus has imparted to its buried glass. These windows 
were indeed, in the Avords of Arthur Upson's hne, 

"Brave with faint memories, rich in rainbow-rust." 

I wandered idly about enjoying such things as the turret 
and mossed shingles of the smoke-house and the holes that some 
departed bird-lover had cut beneath the eaves for the martins. 
And I fell in love with the round brick dove-cote, isolated in a 
field of its own. Winsome, demure it stood, filling the world 
all about with the persuasive cooing notes of its dove-folk, and 
filling the ])ilgrim's breast with an irrational impulse to hasten 
home and build one just like it. 

Inside the house I came into even more intimate touch 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 39 

with the spirit of seventeenth century aristocracy than in the 
quadrangle. On two sides the great hall was bordered by 
rooms with arabesqued transoms. They were paneled, like it- 
self, up to the ceiling, and rich, Uke itself, with priceless por- 
traits of ancestors and celebrities. Chief among the latter was 
the virile, full length Peak canvas of young Washington lean- 
ing on a brass cannon. And I felt sure that this picture, if it 
had been better known, might have made it more difficult for 
miserable old biographers hke Parson Weems to dry up that 
full-blooded hero of ours into a steel engraving. Among the 
canvas ancestors I found a striking resemblance to my kind 
hostess ^Irs. Bransford, who was a ^liss Carter. For the 
Carters acquired Shirley less than half a century after its 
foundation about 1611, and have kept it ever since. 

The other two sides of the great hall were taken up by a 
lordly staircase. It was remarkable to see by what reticent 
means this staircase secured its effect of goodlv, cavalier 
opulence; — just an extra bead on the banister, and a swan's 
neck curve at the turn of the balustrade, echoed by the grace- 
fully modeled soffit, — yet the hall could take one back as per- 
haps no other room in the land to the sort of life they once 
lived in such gathering places in "]Merrie England." 

Mr. and 3Irs. Hutchins in their exhilarating book, "House- 
boating on a Colonial Waterway," have reconstructed the old 
life of this room: "It tells of the time when the life of a house- 
hold centered in the spacious hall; when there the great fire 
burned and the family gathered round — of the time when halls 
were the hearts, not the mere portals, of homes. . . . Dusky 
in far corners or sharply drawn near the fire-light, stood, in 
those days, chests and tables and forms and doubtless a bed 
too with its valance and curtains. In a medley, typical of the 
times in even the great homes, were saddles, bridles, and em- 
broider}' frames, swords, guns, flute, and hand-hTe. 

"Here, in a picturesque and almost medieval confusion, the 
family mostlv gathered, while favorite hounds stretched and 



40 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

blinked in the chimney-place beside the black boy who drowsily 
tended the fire. 

"Here the long, narrow 'tabull-bord' was spread with its 
snowy cloth, taken from the heavy chest of linen in the corner, 
of which my lady of the manor was prodigiouslj"^ proud. Upon 
the cloth were placed soft-lustered pewter and, probably al- 
most from the first, some pieces of silver too. The salt was 
'sett in the middys of the tabull,' likely in a fine silver dish 
worthy its important function in determining the seating about 
the 'bord.' . . . 

"Then, from the distant kitchen in the quadrangle, came 
slaves or indentured servants bearing the steaming food in 
great chargers and chafing-dishes. Doubtless, in those earliest 
days, the food was eaten from wooden trenchers, not plates; 
while from lip to lip the communal bowl went round." 

There were modern phenomena at Shirley, too, that rivalled 
in quaintness even the pillared firej^laces, the brass registers 
and the venerable silver. These were the negro ser^'ants. 
There was one pickaninny chore-boy who 'lowed his front name 
was Delawarebreakwater. On inquiry it developed that his 
father claimed that he had once read in a book the high-sound- 
ing words Delaware Breakwater, and, captivated by their mu- 
sic, and by their honorable inclusion between the mystic covers 
of literature, he decided that they would make a handsome 
name for the baby. But the best part of it was that, to the 
certain knowledge of my hostess, the ingenious father could 
not read a word of print. 

I heard more of the diverting naivete of the dusky sen-ants. 
Mrs. Bransford told me how she had come one day not long 
before to eat her luncheon at the successor of the old "tabull- 
bord" and had found it quite innocent of food. This dialogue 
had then taken place between her and the waitress: 

ISIrs. Bransford. "Susan, you may bring on the soup." 

Susan (with the utmost serenity). "All waste soup." (I 
spilled the soup.) 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 43 

Mrs. B. "Then bring on the tomatoes." 
Susan (with a beatific grin). "All waste 'matoes." 
INIrs. B. (a shade impatiently). "Well, then, the sweet po- 
tatoes." 

Susan (imperturbably as ever). "All waste 'tatus, but ah 
done pick 'em up again." 

I was driven down river to Westover, — not by any flaw in 
the liospitality of Shirley, but, au contraire, by its coachman. 
We were scarcely ever out of sight of one of Virginia's splendid 
holly trees ; and the ample beeches brought to mind the gnarled 
trunks of Burnliam wood in the mother country. We passed 
not far from the negro settlement called Turkey Trot. And 
it developed that its modern somiding name was actualh' a relic 
of colonial times when Turkey Trot was the common name of 
the high woods where the wild turkeys liked to hold their stately 
dances. I asked the coachman how the inhabitants lived. 
"Oh, they own an acre or two and truck a bit when they feel 
like it. But I don't really know how they get by. This 
here 's a great country for people to get by 'thout working." 

On catching sight of Westover I felt that I now had data 
enough to know that the mendacious art of photography was 
particularly untrustworthy when it came to reproducing cava- 
lier Virginia; and that photographs were quite unable to sug- 
gest the richness, the vital charm and color of these old walls 
and portals and exuberantly flowering gardens or the historic 
quality of their atmosphere. I was only sorry that ISIr. Fenn 
and ]Mr. INIan^in had not preceded me down river with brush 
and palette instead of pencil. 

Ever since the building of Westover, early in the eighteenth 
century, it has been the show place of the James and, in its 
heyday under the ownership of the Byrd family, it was prob- 
ably the smartest manor house in the Old Dominion. In an 
old volume in the library, the Marquis de Chastellux's Travels 
in 1780-2, I came upon this entry: "We travelled six and 



44 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

twenty miles without halting, in very hot weather, but by a 
very agreeable road, with magnificent houses in view at every 
instant; for the banks of the James River form the garden of 
Virginia. That of ]Mrs. Bird, to which I was going, surpasses 
them all in the magnificence of the buildings, the beaut\- of its 
situation, and the pleasures of society." Shadowed by enor- 
mous tulip-poplars, this house stands between a bowling green 
and a lawn that slopes to the river. Tall and haughty, its high 
dormer windows and chimneys lord it over the low wings and 
outbuildings somewhat as Colonel William Byrd, the founder 
of Petersburg and Richmond, must have lorded it over his fel- 
low cavaliers in the dawn of the eighteenth century. Xothing, 
however, can surpass in haughty dignity the lawn's wide- 
spreading yew, from which Robin Hood and all his "merrie 
men" could have cut long-bows and to spare. 

When both main portals of the house are standing open, the 
sight from the river lawn is curiously impressive. Looking up 
the hospitable steps that converge toward the door, the eye 
catches within a proud stairway to one side, then travels through 
another door and under the lovely vine-clad iron filigree of the 
main gate out over the bowling green to the fields and forests 
wliere a thousand Byrd slaves once tilled a hundred thousand 
Byrd acres. A noble view it is, with every contour still elo- 
quent of aristocracy. 

When one faces the other way it is easy to reconstruct the 
scenes of the old days before the railway came to Norfolk and 
Newport News. Then the great square-riggers used to lie, 
a dozen and more together, below the river wall, bearing rum, 
muscovado sugar, molasses and lime juice from the Barbados, 
and from "London Towne" Shakespeare folios, Sheraton 
chairs, silk stockings, silver-ware, gems, and the like — and 
finally sailed away with holds rammed full of the fragrant weed 
which was the New World's most universally accej^table gift 
to the Old. 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGIXIA 45 

Little of the original Westover furniture is to be found there 
to-day except a curious sideboard with a concealed secretar}'^ 
where the housekeeper used to keep her accounts. But the 
splendid paneling remains on the walls. And the bed cham- 
bers have an especial flavor of the old days ; for they are fitted 
with "powder closets," through the doors of which the old-time 
belles and beaux used to insert their heads for the coiffeur. 

The Westover garden has box trees almost as large and 
fine as those at Shirk}'. In ]May one looks doA\Ti a box -bor- 
dered walk to where an arbor of wistaria sends its purple mist 
to the very summit of a large hackberry. Through a mass 
of white and lavender shiaibs one makes out the roof of a ven- 
erable tool house, a dream of lichens and moss, vines and yel- 
low tea-roses. On the buttressed wall behind it the enormous 
turkeys of Westover love to strut with something of that 
gloomy, almost tragic self-importance that so often seems to 
go with the ownership of a grand estate. A little to the 
right of the jiurple mist, show through glimpses of magnolia 
the stately roof and chimneys of the manor house with its por- 
tal gleaming out underneath; while to one side, a dazzling 
ribbon of river appears to lie basking like a lizard on top of the 
garden wall. 

In the center of this garden, under a pretentious obelisk, 
and a heavy and remarkable epitaph, referring to his wealth 
and the noble friends he made in England, lies "the Honorable 
William BjTd, Esqr." That most elegant of the owners of 
Westover was the foremost Virginia gentleman of his day 
and one of the first of the long line of American plutocrats 
whose memory lingers pleasantly with us despite the lapse of a 
century. 

A quarter of a mile away lies William BjTd's famous and 
beautiful daughter Evelyn, who was taken to England at six- 
teen and presented at court. She received the homage of such 
men as Lord Chesterfield, Beau Xash, and even of the re- 



46 llOMAXTIC AMERICA 

doubtable Alexander Pope himself. She fell in love with 
Charles Mordaunt, the grandson of Lord Peterborough. But 
"that first gentleman of Virginia," her father^ would not hear 
of the match, haled poor EvehTi home with all speed, and re- 
pulsed young JNIordaunt when he came sailing over sea and 
landed, a suppliant, at Westover wharf. Then it is recorded 
of Evelyn that, "refusing all offers from other gentlemen, she 
died of a broken heart." It is also recorded that her ghost was 
seen not long after, fluttering imi^atiently about the tombstone 
whereon had been newly chiseled the sort of platitude by means 
of which her worthy father had sought, perhaps, to heal his 
undutiful daughter's heart. This is one of the platitudes: 

"Every worldly Comfort 

fleets away; 
Excepting only what arises. 
From imitating the Virtues 

of our Friends; 
And the contemplation of 

their Happyness." 

At the eastern end of the mansion there is a strange, at- 
tractive little house with a heavily mossed roof. It is one of 
those i^laces of mystery and dimly conjectured romance of 
which we have all too few on this side of the Atlantic. ]My 
genial host, the elder son of the family, lit a curious iron 
lantern and led me down a dozen feet of ladder to where, from 
the bottom of a large dry well, there branched out two sub- 
terranean chambers, each nine feet long by five by five. And 
a few inches above the floor of each there showed the top 
of a brick shaft a yard square. What were these rooms? 
Scarcely refuges from the Indians, for the occupants might 
easily have been smoked out by the savages. They may pos- 
sibly have been connected with a certain secret passage whose 
l)eginning has been discovered in the cellar of the house. But 
Mhat Avere the little square shafts? At any rate, my host 
assured me that he intended soon to get to the end of the 





THE DISIXG ROOM 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 49 

passage and the bottom of the mystery and to see what he 
should see. 

Happy man! Only to think of the possibilities of having 
one's spade strike with a dull thud on treasure once hidden 
from the Indians ! Or perhaps it was hidden from the Whigs 
in Revolutionary days. For, hanging in the Westover hall 
to-day is a letter signed by one of the William Byrds and dated 
1765, in which that old Tory declares that "America is on the 
high-road to destruction." And his widow, too, who was 
cousin-german to Benedict Arnold, was more than once sus- 
pected of connivance with the British army. 

To me the grand old manor house was most impressive by 
moonlight as it held up its aristocratic head behind the sweep- 
ing arabesejues of the tulip-poplar branches. On its strip of 
shingle the mile-wide expanse of the river behind me played 
an arpeggio accompaniment to the myriad-voiced night. 
A far lamp twinkled close to where, on the opposite shore, once 
stood the rival mansion which was blown out of existence by 
the Federal gunboats when iNIcClellan made his headquarters 
at Westover. And faintly from the east came the notes of the 
wild ducks as they floated up to their favorite marshes on the 
turn of the tide. 

Unlike Shirley and Westover, Brandon is not to be seen 
from the river; for it lies behind a garden more extensive and 
imposing tlian those up-stream. A ferny path leads from the 
wharf through woods to a rustic seat on the river bank. Rest- 
ing here one looks up the main axis of the garden, a wide sod 
path overarched by trees and flowering vines, to a Corinthian 
porch gleaming at the far end. This belongs to what is prob- 
ably the oldest house in America which has been continuously 
occupied since its building. 

Before entering one lingers to enjoy the borders of cow- 
slips, jonquils, flags, Easter lilies and peonies, and the wild 
grape vine half a foot through that has reached tentacles all 



50 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

over a great cucuniljer tree. A cross walk leads one past a 
large ailanthus tree smothered in honeysuckle and under rose 
arbors, to where one can dimly discern an old garrison house 
with loopholes and iron doors and blinit ends to the gabies. 

On one side an old-fashioned flower garden is shadowed by a 
gigantic pecan spreading six score feet. From about this 
point it is a memorable thing to catch a first glimpse of the 
manor-house; to look past the dark, burnished, venerable Irish 
yews and see how romantically the three main divisions of the 
long, ivy-mantled structure rise up among the snowy blooms of 
the magnolias, behind the famous ramjiart of Brandon box. 
Lying there wide and dense in the sunlight with its vivid greens 
and high lights and dead shadows, this hedge rather suggests a 
jeweled rapier half drawn from a scabbard of ebony. 

The long line of the house is reminiscent in a way of West- 
over. But it has more charm. Above the porch where the 
scars of Federal bullets are still plainly to be seen, perches 
a carven pineapple, a symbol of hospitalitj' which received 
abundant vindication at the hands of my dehghtful hosts, Mr, 
and JNIrs. Decatur ]Mayo, 

At a first glance one knows that the house is in the hands of 
people with a reverent feeling for the past. Xo recent paint 
has been allow'ed to make its front spick and span — and 
commonplace. A first glance at the interior brought to mind 
the fact that Poe had lived nearby in Richmond and had doubt- 
less followed in the footsteps of a legion of other illustrious 
Americans in visiting these high-paneled rooms; and the 
thought came that the House of Usher, a long time before its 
fall, may not have looked unlike Brandon. 

I peered into a noble entrance hall divided in the center by 
a triple arch; then tlirough the other jjortal down a long vista 
to field and forest ; then back through the arching garden walk 
to a sheet of river spotted by a single sunht sail. One could 
almost hear the old hall saying that everything here was as it 
used to be, except that the Federal vandals had stripped away 



I 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGIXIA 51 

most of the paneling and broken the famous window panes 
where had been autographed in diamond point the names of 
such guests as John Tyler, ^Millard Fillmore and Lafayette. 

I passed through a door and into an assemblage of thorough- 
bred aristocrats that looked down from the walls. It was re- 
freshing to find in an American house a collection of old family 
portraits of real merit as paintings. There was one by Peale 
of Benjamin Harrison, Jefferson's college chum. This 
brought to mind that my hostess was one of that renowned 
family of Harrisons who have lived at Brandon for more than 
two centuries. There was a portrait by Kneller of the Col. 
BjTd who sleeps at Westover; and beside him a more beautiful 
Kneller of poor Evelyn, his daughter. Her presence on these 
walls was explained by the portrait of her niece who married 
Col. Harrison. 

Over a door in the dining room was a little dark man, a 
JNIister Walthoe, one time speaker of the House of Burgesses. 
This characteristic American once offered his portrait, and 
made the following proposition, to Col. BjTd, the friend of 
noblemen: "Set me among your dukes and earls with my hat 
on my head, to signify that I am a true Republican who will 
uncover to none of them, and I wiU give you the finest diamond 
ring to be bought in America." 

"Agreed," cried the Colonel, "and I will hang you over the 
door to show that you are taking leave of them." 

To this day Mister Walthoe, stubbornly hatted, still sticks 
to his Republican post over the door. The reader may see 
him on the left in the picture of the dining room. And to this 
day his diamond is worn by the Harrisons. 

Such a house as Brandon is bound to have a mystery. In 
fact, the old manor has two. One is a tarnished wedding ring 
that has swung from the rosette of a parlor chandelier above 
the heads of generation after generation of Harrisons, and is 
so old that its true significance has been lost. 

The other mystery is a secret panel discovered beside a 



52 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

fireplace a dozen years ago. It led to a narrow passage which 
had no outlet whatever and, strange to say, the panel was nailed 
on the passage side, in plain defiance of the laws of nature. In 
the earth just outside of this, a small subterranean chamber was 
found. But there was nothing to connect the one with the 
other except the tunneling of busy imaginations. 

At last I left these relics of colonial comfort and magnif- 
icence, and sought those still older relics of the poverty and 
despair that once surrounded the "cradle of the republic," — the 
tiny plot of malarial ground upon whose fate, for so many 
years, the fate of a continent hung. 

Above the pier a signboard announced: "Jamestown Is- 
land, Site of the First Permanent English Settlement in 
America, 1607." A sense of unreality stole over me, obscuring 
the actual view as if it had been one of those clouds in which the 
Greek gods used to cloak themselves when they interfered in 
human affairs. Jamestown Island ! It was almost as though 
the board had announced Crusoe's Island, or Prospero's, or 
Polyphemus's, or Treasure Island, or the Island of the Pha?- 
aceans. Indeed, once on my way back from the Olympic 
Games in Athens I had stopped for a dip in that very harbor 
where the much-enduring Odysseus had ended his two days' 
swim and had so indecorously broken up Nausicaa's game of 
ball. And even there I had felt a more clear-cut sense of 
the authenticity of that classic incident than I was now able to 
feel in the authenticity of Captain John Smith who, in bronze, 
swaggered bravely on a brand-new pedestal at the river's 
brink. 

How was it decently credible that this colonial Odysseus of 
ours could ever have actually set out from here, and immedi- 
ately met with that particular one of his adventures which was 
to lead him straight into the hearts of all American schoolboys 
by way of Powhatan's stone pillow, the descending big sticks 
and the intervening maiden Pocahontas who, "when no entrety 




^^ 



"**SB«W«» 



fc"-^''r:s 



JAMICSTUWN LSI. AMI 



■:*/ 



'/',««», 




OLD (lOl'SE AT Wd.I.IAMSlUUn 



i 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 55 

could prevail, got his head in her arms and laid her own upon 
his to save him from death"? 

And it seemed no easier to believe in the horrible "starving 
time" which followed the Captain's return to England. This 
experience first reduced the five hundred colonists to sixtj% then 
to cannibalism. And things grew worse and worse initil one 
man killed his own wife, powdered her, and partly ate her. 
Then he was discovered and roasted alive at the stake: while 
another hungry wretch threw his Bible into the flames, crying: 
"There is no God!" 

But the final page of Jamestown's black first chapter seemed 
more credible. For it was almost exactly paralleled by a page 
from the pioneer history of the Pacific coast. There Portola 
and his fellow discoverers were about to abandon Serra and 
their new-found California when the sails of the relief shi]i, 
whiter than the wings of Xoah's dove, appeared in the offing of 
San Diego Bay. Here the despairing little company had al- 
ready abandoned Jamestown to the wild men and beasts that 
lurked on the edges of the clearing, and had gained the wide 
reaches of Hampton Roads, when, "with a ^^^ld surmise" they 
discovered on the waters ahead a black dot. And this grew 
until it turned into the longboat of Lord De La ^Var the new 
Governor. And presently they heard tidings of his three well- 
provisioned sliips which had just passed a certain headland 
do^^Tl stream, quite unconscious that they had been the means of 
naming it for future ages. Point Comfort. So the refugees 
turned back to re-found America. 

It would, no doubt, be easier to associate this sort of history 
with the present Jamestown if the American people had only 
taken possession of the island a few years ago and patrolled it 
against improvers. For, judging from earlier pictures and 
the accounts of those who knew Jamestown as it was, we have 
stood stupidly by while our most interesting eastern ruin has 
been ruined. Jamestown was recently a goodly ruin, romantic, 
beautiful. An eloquent, loopholed church tower, probably 



56 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

more than three centuries old, stood amid ancient tombs near 
traces of Captain John Smith's stockade, with here and there 
the remnant of a daAvn-of-the-Xew- World dwelling or powder 
magazine or public building. It was a thrilling, poetic place, 
fit to come and muse in and relive in imagination the twilight 
days of our dawning nation. The United States could ill 
afford to play the spendthrift with such a spot. 

Then came the archa?ologists with their steel probes and 
uncovered, besides other buried romance, two sets of ruinous 
church walls adjoining the tower. These should, of course, 
have been protected fi'oni the elements in some inconspicuous 
way, perhaps by some such glazing process as was used to pre- 
sei-ve New York's obelisk. Instead, the improvers built over 
them a neat brick chapel which possesses little more atmosphere 
than an ordinary factory or morgue or ice-house. The struc- 
ture might provide suitable headquarters for a League for the 
Suppression of American Poetry, or an Association for the 
Destruction of Colonial Antiquities. Standing there behind 
the old tower, it has almost completely destroyed the glamour 
of its sacred environment. 

The builders of the chapel were even led by practical con- 
siderations to demolish parts of the venerable walls. That is, 
in order to protect these relics they first partially destroyed 
them. Also they tidied up the picturesque tower and enclosed 
the churchyard with a practical iron fence. 

Not content with this desecration, more improvers put up, 
over against the stockade, a bright new rest-house as a fit spot 
for the enchanted tourist to linger and bathe himself in the 
ancient poetry of the place. This structure is so glaringly 
modern that it shows from the water as the most conspicuous 
object on the island. It is competent to suppress any stray 
germs of romance that the chapel has spared. 

The federal government, not to be outdone, followed this 
auspicious lead by erecting at great expense a monument fully 
as congruous as the chapel with the spirit of the spot. It 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 57 

stands there to-day, an Egyptian obelisk, dominating '"James 
Towne" and calling upon its far sun-god to explain what on 
earth this all means. Of course it is of small use to cry over 
stolen horses, even though these happen to be of the breed of 
Pegasus. But the Jamestown stable is not yet entirely empty. 
And its door ought to be locked as securely as may be by 
planting out the rest house and the keeper's house and pulling 
down the noxious little chapel, and cutting the obelisk up into 
headstones for rash improvers. 

It is hard for the pilgrim to Jamestown, "the Cradle of the 
Republic," to resist a visit to its delightfully unimproved suc- 
cessor, Williamsburg, "the Maker of the Union." The first 
vehicle I met on the way there was characteristic of the primi- 
tive countryside. Two "be fob de wah" darkies were perched 
on a home-made, rough-hewn, two wheeled cart. They were 
driving, by means of a bit of rope tied to a ring in his nose, an 
antediluvian ox. And I found that nearly all the sights 
that followed belonged to the period "befoh" one "wah" or 
another. 

Even the wayside flowers had their historic significance. 
Here and there were patches of that bright yellow Scotch 
broom by means of which, as tradition tells, one may trace the 
movements of the British troops over this whole region. For 
the seed of the broom happened to be mixed with their horses' 
feed. Another equally attractive explanation of the strange 
plant's presence, is that Thomas Jefferson, when in Scotland, 
fell in love with it and brought home large quantities of the 
seed. He kept his pockets filled with it. And whenever he 
went walking or riding about Williamsburg he would scatter 
it broadcast. If this is true the golden condition of the site 
of the House of Burgesses is evidence that the father of De- 
mocracy was often at his legislative post. 

Williamsburg considers itself historically the most opulent 
to^\-n in America. The excellent little vellow guide-book but 



58 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

echoes its citizens in claiming that "here more significant events 
have taken phice than are recorded in the chronicles of any 
other borough. Its streets are fairly haunted by the person- 
alities of the great ; echoing and re-echoing with the names of 
titled governors, brilliant statesmen, astute theologians and 
brave warriors of world-wide reputation." 

The first glimpse of the place is reassuring. Certainly any 
village has claims to pretension where a road called Duke of 
Gloucester Street, joined by a square called Palace Green, runs 
from the second oldest college in America to the site of the 
capitol where Patrick Henry blew into clear flame the smolder- 
ing Revolution, and where were adopted the Virginia Resolu- 
tions, the Declaration of Rights, and "the first written Consti- 
tution of a free and independent State ever framed." 

This last clause (quoted from the memorial tablet) reminds 
one that, when it comes to such claims, Provincetown is a match 
for Williamsburg. For the town at the tip of Cape Cod gave 
birth to the first written constitution known to modern times. 
The two places, by the way, bear each other a rather striking 
resemblance. Both consist in the main of one long street, bor- 
dered by great, gnarled trees and old-time houses. And the 
hand of Sir Christopher Wren has been laid on both; there on 
the church, here on the college. The Virginian street, how- 
ever, is as much more stately and aristocratic than the 
Massachusetts, as the name Duke of Gloucester is, than "Com- 
mercial." And it can truly claim to be the prototype of Penn- 
sylvania Avenue in Washington which was laid out on similar 
lines to run between two public institutions. 

I began my sight-seeing with a mystery. Some distance 
from where the vanished Palace once housed its lengthy line of 
colonial governors is a subterranean vault of brick, almost as 
cryptic as the underground regions at Westover. Old trees 
grow on the mound above it. Prosaic folk are fond of calling 
this "Lord Dunmore's wine cellar." But what did the old 
Lord's wine so far from his palace? Personally I incline to 





^ i^fe^ 






•N, 1 



>^ 



fittl 




Kl. Ui <.I.IH I l.SII.K Sllil.l-.l AM» lilU l.>\ I- A HI -I I (HI |l, ||, \\ ll.l.j AM.>I11K(! 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 61 

the opinion that this was a secret place of refuge, built by the 
Tory rulers when they saw which way the political winds were 
blowing in Virginia. 

Though the Palace has disappeared its garden terraces have 
not. Every Spring their jonquils still proclaim a staunch 
belief in the immortality of beauty. And in Palace Green 
there remain traces of the avenue of thick lindens down which 
many a governor used to drive in state to the House of Bur- 
gesses, gorgeously stockinged, robed and be-wigged, with six 
milk white horses to his coach. 

On the Green is a small house, known to readers of ^Miss 
Johnson's "Audrey," which offers another agreeable mystery. 
One of its window panes bears this diamond-graved inscription : 

F. B. S. B. 

1796 Nov br 23 Q! fatal day 

But why this twenty-third of November was fatal, the most 
patient research has never been able to discover. 

From the grass of Palace Green one could point a kodak in 
almost any direction and be sure of snapping something his- 
toric. Perhaps it would be the site of the first theatre in 
America, or the Court House of 1769, or the quaint peak of 
the revolutionary magazine known as The Powder Horn, from 
which there issued more than one black grain to make its report 
"heard 'round the world." In another corner of the Green, 
beyond an aristocratic looking old house is a low lying church 
that speaks of high lineage with its white shuttered nave win- 
dows, ivied apse and graciously cut tower. And well these two 
may hold up their heads. For the house belonged to George 
Wythe whose name stands below the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. In one of its rooms was started the first American 
law school. Here "Washington, hot on the trail of Cornwal- 
lis, had his headquarters iti 1781. And here his ghost still 
wanders occasionally, clanking its scabbard from room to 
room. 



G2 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

As for the second building, Old Bruton Parish Church, as 
it stands to-day, is the mother of the Episcopal Church in 
America. It is the lineal descendant of America's first church, 
founded at Jamestown. The architecture of this earliest edi- 
fice, as described by the pen of Captain John Smith, reminds 
one again of the California pioneers and their first church, 
imjjrovised of rushes b)' the great Serra on San Diego beach 
almost two centuries later. 

"Wee" wrote the Captain, "did hang an awning (which is 
an old saile) to three or foure trees, to shadow us from the 
Sunne, our walles were railes of wood, our seates unhewed 
trees, till we cut planks ; our pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two 
neighboring trees; in foule weather w'c shifted into an old 
rotten tent." 

Occasionally on the third Sunday after Trinity the Bruton 
congregation make an anniversary pilgrimage over to the 
poor, abandoned, violated island. They carry with them 
Jamestown's original communion dishes of silver, stretch a 
sail-cloth between trees near the Captain's stockade, and hold 
service in the ancient way. 

To walk in the aisles of Bruton Church is to wander among 
the shades of the makers of America. Each pew bears a tablet 
commemorating some illustrious warden or vestryman. And 
as one reads the names of the Pendletons, the Harrisons, the 
Lees, the Randolphs, of Patrick Henry, Tjder, ISIonroe, ]\Iadi- 
son, Jefferson and Washington, one realizes how happily the 
spirit of the place is summed up on the fly leaf of the Bible pre- 
sented to Bruton by King Edward the Seventh of England: 
"A shrine rich in venerable traditions of worship, in solemn 
memories of patriots and statesmen and in historic witness to 
the oneness of our peoples." Upholding this volume is a beau- 
tiful bronze angel of peace, modeled by Roine and presented 
by Colonel Roosevelt, — a startling contrast to the church's only 
other piece of sculpture. This is a relief representing the his- 
toric sail-cloth service. It is so crude as to suggest that it might 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 65 

have been intended by the "improvers" for the further adorn- 
ment of long-suffering Jamestown. 

William and Mary, the second oldest college in America, 
heads the Duke of Gloucester Street. They say that the dif- 
ference between this institution and Chicago University is that 
the one has traditions and no money and the other has money 
and no traditions. But Virginia would not trade with Illinois, 
— no, not for many Rockefellers. In the front hall of the main 
building hang two large oil-cloth placards. And there is 
scarcely room on the homely surface of the one to summarize 
the college's share in the Revolution; nor on the other, her 
equally proud part in developing the Union. Inter alia Wil- 
liam and JNIary has the distinction of having been the alma 
mater of seventeen State governors, four signers of the Decla- 
ration of Independence, twelve cabinet officers, one chief jus- 
tice and three presidents of the United States. And her 
record is full of such deeds as having extended financial assist- 
ance to struggling young Harvard College, and of having 
founded the Phi Beta Kappa Society. 

In the southern part of town, separated by a field, are the 
remains of two houses. In one lived jNIartha Custis who mar- 
ried Washington. In the other lived ^lary Cary, whom Wash- 
ington once loved at sight and wished to marry. But her father 
dismissed the modest young suitor as haughtily as any Col. 
BjTd would have done. "If that is your business here, sir," 
he cried, "I wish you to leave the house. My daughter has 
been accustomed to ride in her own coach." Years afterward 
^larj' is reputed to have fainted dead away when from her 
window she saw the father, not of her children, but of his 
country, riding in state up Palace Green. 

Well east of the charming small Debtor's Prison there once 
lived the notorious Captain Teach, alias Blackbeard the Pi- 
rate. He was the terror of the south-eastern coast and, from 
the old print of him reproduced in Tyler's "Williamsburg," he 
was, every inch of his seven feet, the ideal red rover, a figure 



66 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

calculated to have thrown Provincetown's Stevensonian pirate 
into the deep shade. His inky beard depended upon liis breast 
in five snaky curls and his moustachios hung down to make 
seven. He had ghoulish round eyes smoldering under devil- 
ishly circumflex eyebrows ; and a carved imp of Satan grimaced 
horribly from the handle of his cutlass. As he stands in the 
picture with his sash stuck full of pistols, leaning on a long 
flint-lock beside a barrel of rum, while his pinnace and lugger 
are a-loading in the background, one can almost hear a terrible 
"yo-ho-ho!" bursting from his lips. Truly a finished figure of 
a pirate, and one for Williamsburg to be right proud of. Cut- 
lass in hand Blackbeard made a game end in Pamlico Sound in 
1718. His minions w^re taken alive to Williamsburg and 
hanged near his old rooftree in a lane which was christened in 
their dishonor, Gallows Road. 

Almost opposite this worthy's home is a house which, on 
being recently repaired, disclosed many Indian arrowheads. 
They had been shot under the shingles in early Colonial times, 
and there they had stayed. Here died the famous INliss Gibbie 
Gault, one of the long line of rare characters which this town 
has reared. INIiss Gibbie was the ardently loved schoolmistress 
of a generation ago, and her pupils are never tired of telling 
about her. 

"A square face INIiss Gibbie had," one of them assured me, 
"like it was carved out of wood." She had a flexible mouth 
and inflexible habits and convictions. Until noon she always 
wore a night-cap tied with tapes under her chin, and a "shang- 
hai." She used to declare that if Queen Victoria herself 
should call on her before noon, she would n't receive her. To 
the day of her death she was a profound Tory, and declared the 
political parties of America too plebeian to be noticed. On 
the Fourth of July she always kept the house and would not 
suff*er a single ray of light to pass through her shutters. 

Miss Gibbie used to pose as an "infidel" and liked to explain 
her spinsterhood by saying that, when quite young, she had 



THE SPELL OF OLD VIRGINIA 69 

read "Paradise Lost" and had never since seen anj- man half as 
attractive as jNIilton's Satan. For all that, she could not suc- 
ceed at first in convincing people of her infidelity. They 
thought it was just one of Miss Gibbie's jokes. So she re- 
sorted to a last, desperate expedient. She bought materials 
for a bright pink waist, and sat at the open window on Sunday 
morning as people went to church, shamelessly sewing. That 
convinced the horrified community. 

Miss Xancy Craig was another WilHamsburg character. 
She belonged to a rich old family. It was her custom to attend 
all the tea parties in town with her reticule on her arm. And, 
when nobody seemed to be looking, she would slip into this 
reticule a cake here and a lump of sugar there or a couple of 
beaten biscuit. And not a soul ever noticed this peculiarity — 
because she was JSIiss Xancy Craig. Then, at the end of the 
week, the lady would give a grand tea and feed her friends 
upon all the good things she had gleaned from them. 

Once when ]Miss Nancy was making the rounds and had 
arrived at a particularly elaborate tea-party, a young man, the 
local wag, thought he would plague her. "Now you know- 
what I 'm going to do?" he suddenly announced, "I 'm going 
'round and open every lady's reticule and see what 's in it. 
And the lady that won't let me, will have to let me kiss her." 
So all the ladies let him open their reticules, and nothing sen- 
sational was found in them. jSIiss Nancy sat there growing 
more and more fidgety. When the wag came to her she sud- 
denly threw her arms about his neck in the most spontaneous 
way in the world and said, "Why, Alec, I don't mind kissing 
you a bit." 

Then, there was Lady Paradise who had a coach but no 
horses. It was indispensable to her aristocratic soul, however, 
to feel that she was driving in state almost daily down the 
avenue. So, with immense difficulty she had the coach brought 
into her large front hall, and obliged the butler to roll her back 
and forth there every fine afternoon. I hear that she used to 



70 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

do her hair up in such "powerful style" that she could not 
endure to liide the vision with a bonnet. So she walked out 
bareheaded. But it occurred to her that people might think 
that she was economizing on dress. So she had a negro page 
follow close behind her carrying a large silver tray. And on 
the tray sat her best bonnet. 

But let us hurriedly make an end. For I perceive that these 
characters are leading us in spirit almost to our own day. And 
anything so modern is not for one moment to be tolerated in 
the venerable region wliich rocked the first cradle of the re- 
pubHc. 



Ill 

THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 

"Pittsburgh ... a smoky beauty, whose hair by day drifts gray over 
the darkening streets, and bj' night is gusts of fire flaring a lightning along 
the rivers. . . . There she stands, a skyscraper city set among a Y of rivers, 
and all circled with workshops and mills and mines. . . . And her gift to 
the world is the bone-work of civilization, Steel." 

James Oppenheim. 

THE beauty of the site of Pittsburgh, like that of the 
immortal gods, would seem to be ageless and invul- 
nerable. For whatever man could do to deface it he 
has done. He found, in the Allegheny and the 
JNIonongahela, two crystal rivers, flowing between splendid 
cliffs, enclosing, as young jNIajor George Washington reported 
a century and a half ago, "a considerable body of flat, well- 
timbered land . . . very convenient for building," and unit- 
ing to form the majestic Ohio. 

Man befouled the streams, bedraggled their banks, ripped 
up the cliffs, hacked down the trees, and dumped refuse in 
their stead. He sowed the imposing heights with hovels and 
set up beneath them black mills to cover ever}i;hing far and 
wide with a film of smoke. 

Then he looked about him and saw that the pristine, virginal 
loveliness of the spot was gone. But lo, in its place had arisen 
a new kind of beauty, a more poignant, dramatic kind, with 
more of thrill and variety and even of sheer charm than sur- 
rounded old Fort Le Boeuf that day when Washington saw the 
land that it was good. 

I never come within range of the spell of Pittsburgh without 

71 



72 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

wishing to conduct thither the lying sage who declared that 
there is nothing new under the sun. For Pittsburgh is some- 
thing new. A few years ago an enthusiastic painter, writing 
of the place, declared that "the indescribable freshness of its 
motives, the infinite variety of its moods, the mirage-like ap- 
pearance of distant hiU-tops, suspended for a moment in the 
turquoise haze and dropping mysteriously from vicAV, the ten- 
der distances, light and volatile as ether . . . the masterful 
disposition of architecture, with a landscape at times primeval 
in character, lend an exotic beauty to this restless background 
that furnishes the jaded traveler with what he has begun to 
look upon as unattainable — a distinctly new thrill." 

This novel kind of beauty is largelj'^ due to the very thing 
which, more than all else, has sealed Pittsburgh's reputation 
for discomfort and sordid ugliness. The smoke is the thing 
which has put upon the place its nick-name of "Hell with the 
Lid Off." But— 

"like the catholic man who hath mightily won 
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain 
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain" — 

so Pittsburgh has won its crowning beauty out of its foulest 
stain — the smoke. 

From any of the city's hundred hills one can enjoy more 
kinds of smoke in an hour than there are kinds of cloud in a 
month. In swift succession pass banners of snow, creamy 
fountains, aerial groves of olive, hanging gardens of lilac and 
rose, hills of oranges and rusty red apples, geysers ranging 
through a thousand grays, from fawn color to sheer brutal dirt, 
then deepening to a black as rich as the tarry coal from which 
it sprang. 

One convenient thing about the smokescape is that you can 
enjoy some part of it wherever you happen to be. In Fourth 
Avenue one morning the lower parts of the office-buildings 
were quite obliterated by a dense, low-lying bank of soft, dusky 




o 
3 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 75 

smoke. But as the eye traveled upward this cloud began to 
thin, until, when it reached the cornices, every detail of them 
stood out sharply in the sunlight against a sky of pale sapphire. 
Such eifects are as interesting as they are characteristic of the 
place. Pittsburgh smoke and fog make strange companions. 
I remember one murky morning when from the tower of the 
Allegheny Library the city resolved itself into a steaming 
caldron, with the sky-scrapers emerging as though a race of 
giants had been condemned to have their feet parboiled. 
About this one feature of the local pageant one might run on 
without end. But any such account as this of the picturesque 
side of the city of beautiful smoke perforce must rigorously 
select a mere handful of effects out of as many as would fill fat 
volumes. 

On arriving in Pittsburgh the first thought of the wise 
beauty-lover is to visit jNIt. Washington, a height on the further 
bank of the INIonongahela River which offers the best view of 
the Y shaped city. The ]Monongahela forms the right prong 
of the Y, the Allegheny the left. And they flow together into 
the stem, which is the Ohio. The two prongs are laced with 
bridges. The apex of the peninsula between them is flat like 
tlie toe of a boot. This rises, as the rivers diverge, into a high 
instep known as "The Hill." So much for geography. The 
pilgrim crosses the Smithfield Street Bridge, enters the small, 
misshapen car of one of those startlingly European "inclines" 
that hale him up the crag at an angle of forty-five degrees, or so, 
and stands straightway upon an eminence 

"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot 
Which men call" 

Pittsburgh. 

As many times as he enters the little distorted car, so many 
utterly different views may he promise himself; because the 
grandeur that is Pittsburgh is almost feminine in the swift 
mutability of its moods and tenses. Let him be well counseled. 



76 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

however, to shun those bright, clear days when the human eye 
can see a record number of miles down the Ohio. They are as 
disillusionizing as a nocturnal view of the New York Library's 
columned facade, robbed of all its glamour of shadow by the 
pitiless forthright glare of the street lamps. The city needs the 
mystery of smoke-veils and mists to appear most alluringly 
Pittsburghian. 

Sometimes, when the peninsula between the Y of rivers 
is decked with a white cloud, and the encircling hills with 
freshly fallen snow, the scene from here looks for all the world 
like Interlaken. A commoner sight is to see the town turn 
itself into a gigantic Christmas tree. At six on some wet De- 
cember evening the streets, in their trappings of holiday light 
which are given back by the gleaming pavements, become great 
white ways for one who looks from ]Mt. Washington, and one 
catches the reflections of the lights in a rippled river surface 
that seems to have turned doubly wet for the occasion. Built 
up to a brilliant apex in the culminating group of sky-scrapers, 
sprinkled over with red and yellow lights and streaks as of 
cotton-wool where the mist has gathered along the water-line, 
with a glow from the southern furnaces shooting through the 
spangles, and the paddle-wheelers lacing the river with their 
searchlight shafts, the scene is like some huge Christmas tree 
with ecstatic little magic-lantern bearers frolicking about its 
base. 

Then in a few hours, what a complete transformation ! The 
morning clears. There is a purple shadow under the Smith- 
field Street Bridge and a ruddy vapor of ore-dust floats from 
the mills underneath. From along the nearer bank of the 
Allegheny there rolls back over the city a series of smoke- 
A\Teaths ranging in hue all the way from alabaster to ebony. 
And now and again, from over the covered wooden bridge, 
bursts a tongue of lurid flame where — 

"Deep in the mills like a tipping cradle, the huge converter turns on its wheel 
And sizzling spills in the ten-ton ladle a golden water of molten steel." 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 77 

But the visitor to Mt, Washington will perhaps find some 
windless afternoon no less satisfying, when the smoke broods 
in a heavy gray-brown pall over the peninsula. In that gross 
atmosphe're everything is miraculously refined. The southern 
bridges, so heavy and awkward in the light of common day, 
now become web-like. "The Hill," looming mighty and far 
away through the murk, is changed into an enchanted moun- 
tain. By-and-by, as sunset warms the sky above the pall and 
as points of light gradually outline the city's towers, one is 
reminded— despite the added element of the smoke— of that 
other American profile which alone is comparable to it— the 
sky-line of Jklanhattan as seen from Columbia Heights. An 
incinerator flames on the opposite bank. And at the psycho- 
logical moment the moon, an airship of ta^vny orange, wings its 
way up through the farther verge of the illumination to hang 
dominant above a heaven of earth studded with golden stars. 
As you stand there, a cloud of smoke puffs up from almost 
under' your feet, obscuring the vision as completely as if an 
extinct" volcano had suddenly renewed its activity on the near 
river bank. The entry of that cloud upon the scene is so 
dramatic that you wonder Avhether Pittsburgh is not stageing 
a new act for your express benefit. With curiosity roused 
you pick your way farther along the cliff-edge. All at once 
you find vourself staring down into the crater of an active Ve- 
suvius, and it occurs to you that this must be the famous even- 
ino- blast of the CUnton Iron and Steel Works. 

You think that you could never tire of the endless variety of 
colorings as the molten pit shoots the interior of the smoke- 
column above it full of fierce lights. Occasionally these are 
overlaid bv blue-black belchings from an inter\^ening train. 
Then as the belchings thin, a fresh color scheme is revealed, be- 
ginning with purple and flowing into a lurid red as the glare 
finds a momentary hole in its enclosing cylinder of smoke. In 
your ears there is the same roaring, hissing sound that you 
have heard when lying on your back upon the needles of a 



78 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

pine forest with a gale tearing through the topmost bouglis. 
After a while the glare dies away and reveals the moon, now 
high over the city and making, between the bridge and the mills, 
a long pool of dimpling silver. And you draw a deep breath 
and give thanks for having been allowed to see the great even- 
ing blast, and turn away full of content — when some one 
touches you on the shoulder and tells you that the great even- 
ing blast is just commencing. Then hastily you look again 
and realize that all that went before has been but a curtain 
raiser to the real drama. 

With awe, and even a sort of unreasoning terror, you see the 
liquid metal sullenly flowing into its gridiron of molds, and the 
waste sjilashing down into a deep, round pit. From this you 
see a huge column of smoke arise and spread itself into the 
well-remembered Vesuvian pine-tree. Now from under the 
shed between the pit and the gridiron comes a display of titanic 
pinwheels and Roman candles. For a moment the smoke 
blows out over the river. And instantly the whole cliff- 
side stands out, every poor, barren detail of it sharply defined, 
yet somehow idealized under the eyes of that terrible search- 
light. Your friend touches you again on the shoulder. "For 
the first few months that I lived on Mt. Wasliington," he re- 
marks, "every time that happened I used to prepare for the 
Day of Judgment." 

After this bird's-eye preparation for Pittsburgh the pilgrim 
slides down hill and plunges into the welter of narrow streets 
and narrower alleys, eager to know whether the romance will 
remain real at closer range. 

The street names are promising. Disjilayed in good clear 
letters at each crossing they do their best to keep up the 
illusion. There is Strawberry Alley which, with its cut-and- 
dried business fronts and muddy pavements, is an anachronism 
quite as pleasing as New York's name-relic. The Bowery. 
Blockhouse Way is fortunately no anachronism, for it boasts 
as neighbor that pride of Pittsburgh, the very blockhouse which 



I 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 81 

was once a redoubt of Fort Pitt, child of Fort Duquesne and 
grandchild of Fort Le Boeuf. To-day its roof of "shakes," its 
ancient bricks held together by curious clami^s, its rough stone 
sub-structure, and looi^holed beams of oak, are silhouetted 
against a background of sky-scrapers and mill-stacks as, next 
door to the bustling fury of a freight-yard, it dreams placidly 
of the past. 

Looking further among the legends at the street corners one 
wonders where else on earth except in a young, vigorous, west- 
ern community of mixed blood and few cherished native tra- 
ditions, could be found such a jolly phantasmagoria of names. 
They keep the traveler in good humor as he hurries from point 
to point and, with their wealth of pathetic, humorous, or ro- 
mantic suggestion, are forever piquing and filliping his 
imagination. 

Some are pat with a complete Yankee patness, as when Mar- 
vista Street runs from the cemetery to the hideous railroad 
tracks that have so ably helped to populate it. The names do 
not lack a characteristically American humor of their own. 
Thus, despite Pittsburgh's deep blue Presbyterianism, Success 
Street significantly lords it over its humble little neighbor Sun- 
day Alley. With a touch of something like pathos Croesus 
Alley runs along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks in one of 
the most abjectly wretched parts of towTi. And a street 
named Refuge runs, naturally enough, out of a street called 
Ketchum. 

In another part Dream Alley leans familiarly up against 
Abstract Avenue, and both flow nearly together into a road 
knowTi as Harmony. This principle of harmony is employed 
even more frequently than that of contrast, as when an avenue 
grossly called Eatham leads obligingly close to another named 
Beverage, which, in turn, is fortunately well within the reach 
of an humble brother called Drj' Cove. But the best instance 
of harmonic naming is in a quarter where the industrial ac- 
cident is one of the commonest things in life, and where, accord- 



82 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

ingly, Ribb Alley, Shadeland Avenue and Wing Alley cheer- 
fully coexist with ISIusic, Ash and Crown Streets, 

There are few parts of Pittsburgh that do not repay dili- 
gence on the part of the open-minded, appreciative prowler. 
It is good fun, for instance, to look about in the toe of the 
"boot" between the converging rivers, on and off Penn Avenue, 
in the old residential quarter, now abandoned to commerce 
and poor families. In Barbeau Street one finds three de- 
lightful double doorways with fan-lights and dignified colonial 
columns, now all the more dignified by reason of the pallid 
mothers and ragged children that swarm about their discolored 
and whittled shafts. 

Or sauntering out Grant Boulevard at dusk one sees the 
Penn Incline ahead, shooting like a great shaft of shadow 
down among the belching mills on the shore of the Allegheny. 
Behind, and framed on one side by one of Pittsburgh's typical 
steep crags, the bulk of the Frick Building dominates the 
scene, side by side with the campanile of Richardson's master- 
piece, the Court House. And the appreciative should not 
miss the view of these focal buildings from FuUerton Street as 
well, looking down steep Webster Avenue. On a snowy day 
the coasting children lend the picture vivacitj', and the amusing 
French-roofed house-fronts lead to the pert belfry of bygone 
days into which the street seems to slide. The masses of the 
lower city lie beyond, well-composed, and the whole scene is 
grandly backed by a sheer primeval cliiF, desperately clung 
to bj' small, sickly-colored cubes of workmen's dwellings. 

One of the most worth-while of all occupations for a jnl- 
grim is to lounge about the watersides and study the river 
life. It may not impress him at all to be told by one of the 
statistically-minded natives (and told quite correctly, too) that 
Pittsburgh's tonnage is double the combined tonnage of the 
world's four greatest maritime ports: New York, London, 
Plamburg and ISIarseilles. But if he have an eye for dramatic 
beauty it will assuredly impress him to stand late on some 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 83 

misty, rainy afternoon not far from the Block House on the 
bank of the Monongahela when the paddle-boats along the 
shore are at their best and the river gleams almost white under 
the Point Bridge, which, partly swathed in mist, takes on a 
piquant strangeness as the lighted trolleys begin to ghde over 
it. The rain makes a luster on the small roofs at its farther 
end. Directly opposite, the miUs are letting off incredible lire- 
works. Trains whizz like smoke rockets along the base of Mt. 
Washington, which towers up like an Olympus in the fog with 
its houses arranged picturesquely against the sky-line. 

One is never duU in Pittsburgh, even in wandering on the un- 
kempt, well-nigh deserted quay. Its desertion is dramatically 
emphasized by the turmoil swirling along its edges, bounding 
its barrenness above by the confused cartwheel traffic of Water 
Street, and below by a complex bridge and paddlewheel traffic, 
with the crews deftly manoeuvering numberless scows, lasso- 
ing them together, and herding them to the barge-acres across 
the river that look for all the world like a baseball grandstand 
crushed flat. 

Not until the pilgrim gazes back upon the peninsula on 
some thick morning from the Anderson Street Bridge does he 
catch the full poetry of the sky-scraper masses which are 
picked out in a rare gray behind the two correlatively flowing 
bridge-ends down stream. These have as a foreground barges 
heaped with coal of various pleasant textures, the richer and 
blacker for being drenched ; and the wreck of a scow half under 
water, half on land, no part of it where a well-behaved scow 
should be. Above these the brutal hulk of a coal dock rises 
menacing, with its maze of derricks and bunkers, to balance 
the crazy floats and manure flats upstream and the tangle of 
steel mills with a single danghng scoop as river sentry. 

In fact, to go upon the Anderson Street Bridge at almost 
any hour of the day or night, in almost any weather, means 
to be encompassed, beset, by so much importunate beauty that 
you scarcely know where to look first; just as when you enter 



84 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

the holy of holies of some supreme picture gallery, and stand 
with bewildered eyes in the Parisian Salon Carre or the Floren- 
tine Tribuna. The best time to loiter on this bridge is be- 
tween four and five of a winter's evening when the smoke pall 
broods over Nunnery Hill. Then the wildly industrialized 
banks, strewn with heaps of rusty hoops, the confused intricacy 
of the dredges along the farther shore, the row of amusing 
house fronts behind them, backed by the spires and bulbs of 
the churches — all show effectively. The amphitheater of hills 
looms mysterious and softly ravishing in the darkening air, 
crowned on the sky-line by a dome placed in the one inevitable 
spot. 

With all these distractions, how can you find time to enjoy 
the rhythmical swirls and sweeps of the bridges, or the profiles 
of the office buildings, or the glow of sunset beyond the new 
born Ohio, or the Thaulow lights it creates in the eddies ; when 
directly under your feet, pushmg three barges heaped with 
bars of steel, a stern-wheeler plows, its gaudy paint contrasting 
with the quiet-hued water Avhich the paddle promptly churns 
to the tone and filminess of old Valencia lace? 

It is a question, however, if the Anderson Street Bridge is 
not best of all in the early evening when it adds to its repertory 
of attractions the reflections in the water — reflections that rival 
the Pittsburgh smoke in their beauty and variety. 

If you stand three-fourths of the way to the North Side, you 
will catch the wide water-paths of diffused radiance from the 
illuminated sky-scrapers, echoes from the nozzles of those pa- 
tient stacks that flame forever among the mills, the greens of 
the arcs interlacing in the tawny flood, the crimson and emerald 
and silver of the boats moored to the northern bank; and a sort 
of milky way from the luminous advertisements which are so 
unreadably effective in reflection that you almost forgive them 
for proclaiming thus blatantly the virtues of Diamond Badge 
Pickles. Then, for a climax, comes the flare of a train pulling 
into Pittsburgh over the Fort Wayne Bridge, just as a con- 




THE CLIFF DWELLINGS 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 87 

verier beyond the station performs its golden-starred miracle. 
And over the whole bosom of the river is enacted a pageant of 
echoed hght more wonderful than the radiance of any noon 
that ever burned down upon the citj'^ of beautiful smoke. 

The true pilgrim, however, must take the bitter with the 
sweet. To offset an exalted hour on such a bridge he is made 
to feel the squalor of many a slum; for a sunset from ]Mt. 
Washington he is made to realize the frightful mortahty of the 
mills. One of the most disturbing spectacles is the sight of 
the dull, or keen, or abstracted faces of the average citizens as 
they hurry by, the great bulk of them utterly oblivious to the 
beauty about them. They seem like famished folk racing des- 
peratelj' through a lane of delicious fountains. It is a sorry 
sjjectacle. For beauty is one of the things our crude, young 
nation most needs. And who of us has yet drunk so deep at 
its source that he can afford to turn his back upon it? Yet it 
seems as though the larger part of the Pittsburghers were so 
intent on making smoke, which shall make them money, which, 
in turn, shall enable them to withdraw to smokeless climes, 
that they have neither the time nor the creative energy left to 
enjoy the unheard-of loveliness which their smoke has con- 
jured into being. "The larger part," I say; for I have met 
with not a few who have discovered and have fallen in love 
with the charm of their own citj\ 

It will not do to accept the word of that amusing volume, 
"Baedeker's United States" that "Allegheny City or the North 
Side . . . offers few attractions to the visitor." On the con- 
trary, the visitor would be well advised to explore for himself. 
Here and there, near the waterside and in the ^Manchester quar- 
ter, he will come upon quaint dwellings of brick with step 
gables and curiously rounded corners, cousins german to the 
old tavern across the river at Thirty-fifth Street and Penn 
Avenue. The city is piled helter-skelter on a hundred hills, 
with industrs' busilv reeking in every valley. Indeed if Pitts- 
burgh were to be caricatured (and why should not cities be cari- 



88 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

catured as well as people?) it might be done in half 
a dozen strokes by setting the fingers of a blast-furnace beneath 
an almost vertical liillside, with a bridge suggested beyond and 
a lofty sky-line closing the prospect. One delights in the stair- 
ways scaling sheer cliffs of curiously chiseled and varicolored 
shale, past tiny dwellings propped up on nothing at all. The 
vista changes kaleidoscopically at every few paces; and the 
original alle3'ways and riotous sheer backyards should make 
these North Side uplands a paradise for the etcher. Indeed, 
one of that fraternity exclaimed to me in a state of high exalta- 
tion: "Say, God Almighty has just planted everj'thing here 
for a fellow!" 

The graveyard of St. Marj'^'s perched on Nunnery Hill is 
worlds removed in spirit from the city of "The Iron Woman" 
at its feet. As one wanders among the ruinous, elaborately 
canen gravestones — most of them evidently the labor of loving 
amateur chisels — one can scarcely realize that he is in America. 
There is a prostrate slab whereon a certain Peter Diebold, who 
was born a few months before Napoleon retreated from Mos- 
cow, declares: 

Hier in diesem rosengarten 
Will ich auf meine Frau und Kinder marten, 
(Here in this garden of roses, in state. 
My wife and children I '11 await.) 

One notes with a certain satisfaction that Peter had only 
four months to wait for his wife and only three years for his 
daughter, and rejoices that a man with so much tender German 
sentiment did not live to see the pitiable state of affairs to- 
day. For, alas! because the dead are no longer buried here, 
the "rosengarten" has shamefully fallen the victim of vandals 
who have toppled over and smashed the quaint, hearty old 
reliefs, and shattered the good Gothic railings of stone and 
even done violence to the walls of the Gothic mortuary chapel. 
Despite the fact that some of the ancient dead have moved in 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 89 

disgust to a newer cemetery where they manage these things 
better, the "rosengarten" to-day is a scene of such abominable 
desecration that one raises the eyes with rehef to the glory of 
the distant city of beautiful smoke beyond the ribbon of river. 

On Troy Hill in St. Anthony's Chapel, Pittsburgh pos- 
sesses a collection of relics of nearly every apostle and saint 
in the calendar. The incumbent priest proudly showed me 
one of St. Anthony's teeth and a part of his habit, the skeleton 
of St. Demetrius, three slivers of the true cross, and no end 
of sacred skulls decently done up in gauze. And, gazing, I 
seemed to breathe again the air of the reliquary chambers of 
Cologne and Hildesheim and the Eternal City. He told how, 
every thirteenth of June, the lame, the halt and the blind make 
a pilgrimage up the hill to touch these relics and be healed, and 
he related some of the miraculous cures that St. Anthony's 
tooth alone had effected. Then, relapsing into our large, 
Yankee habit of speech, he declared this to bo probably the 
largest collection of relics in the world. 

There are few places in Pittsburgh more picturesque than 
Solio. You should adventure upon the flimsy rear balconies 
of the workingmen's houses which overlook the jNIonongahela 
half way out to the East End. Immediately before you 
spreads an expanse of mill roofs, sprouting retort-like cylin- 
ders. Below^ and beyond range rows of monotonous windows 
like the faces of a crowd of uninterested Slavs. But at in- 
tervals, like flashes of rare Slavic animation, illuminations of 
orange radiance transfigure the whole hillside, then die down 
through all ruddy tones to the sullenness of night. Beyond 
the river, and reflected in its surface, similar illuminations 
glorify the clouds of smoke and even pierce through them to 
flush the heavens as if with promises of a coming day of con- 
trast to these pitiable surroundings, a day of serene beauty 
and peace and plenty, — of content and liberty on earth. 

You climb Soho hill past the ruins of two strange buildings 
of rough stone and brick near a fragment of venerable stone 



90 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

arch that once opened on a cave-house in the liill, reHcs of 
colonial days. But up on the hill, though the distant prospect 
is even more wondrous, the horror of the foreground makes one 
blind to anything beyond. Among the misj^eakable negro 
huts, among the slides of bare clay and ashes, among the weeds 
where a blear-eyed skeleton of a puppy gnawing at a shiny 
bone resembles the scarcely human beings at the windows — 
one cannot bask in beauty. One can only flame out in revolt 
against a state of semi-civilized society that can allow such 
misery among fellow-creatures who have not even the solace 
of appreciating the w^onders spread daily at their feet. 

Besides its more typical features Pittsburgh has an abun- 
dance of the sort of attractions more commonly found in Amer- 
ican cities. There is the interesting architecture of the East 
End, of Calvary Church, famous in the annals of American 
Gothic; the impressive First Baptist Church; the satisfying 
group of auditorium churches like Christ's and the Shadyside 
Presbyterian. There is the Carnegie Institute which covers 
half an acre more than the capitol at Washington and is cele- 
brated for its natural history museum and its progressive 11- 
brarj^; for a collection of modern pictures that offers a really 
representative view of the work of our younger painters; and 
for holding the only genuinely international yearly exliibition 
of paintings that America can boast. 

'Not can the curious old Arsenal buildings be ignored; nor 
the imi)ression of mountain solitudes given by Highland Park 
on a thick day; nor how sunset looks from the Technical 
Schools as one faces the gracious outlines of ]\Iemorial Hall, 
and the enlivening front of the Athletic Association and the 
new buildings of Pittsburgh University, the Convent showing 
up on the sky-line like a Rhenish castle with its well-disposed 
masses and pinnacles. 

From near the Institute on Forbes Street the pilgrim must 
not miss an Old-World vignette of one of the excellent spires 
of St. Paul's Cathedral, greatly improved by being seen, thus 




A KI-.NnSDl'.K OK AN Oil) WOKI.I) CAIIIKDU A I (HA 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 93 

isolated, ujj a long alley beyond a tangle of telegraph poles 
and house fronts, a sight which instantly brings to mind the 
lanes that converge upon Ulm and Regensburg and Freiburg 
cathedrals. 

The often painted view of Junction Hollow from the bridge 
at the entrance to Schenley Park ought not to be missed. 
And there is a certain hilltop near the end of the Lincoln 
Avenue trolley line where one should go with one's luncheon, 
on Sundaj' morning, the only smokeless time in the whole week, 
and stay till afternoon when the down-stream mills begin to 
"fire up" and the pageant of the smoke again begins its ever 
varj'^ing, ever fascinating cycle, at each successive moment al- 
tering the scale of color values over the face of wood and field 
and stream into a scheme quite different but no less fascinating. 

No Pittsburgh pilgrimage is complete without a visit to 
one of the large steel plants. First one should win a bird's- 
eye view of what he is afterwards going to see in detail. Per- 
haps the best method is to take a boat up the Monongahela 
and plow past the incredible waterfronts of Homestead, 
Rankin, Braddock, Duquesne and ^SIcKeesport. Failing that, 
one should at least motor in the late afternoon to a certain 
point of vantage on Beechwood Boulevard above the Home- 
stead Bridge. The nearer forest of stacks is reflected in the 
green river, and this design is dimly, beautifully repeated as 
if in echo far back amid the landward murk. Into the open 
spaces, notching here and there the masses of mill beneath the 
stacks, red ingots of glowing steel are pushed from time to 
time, and the arc lamps show violet against them. With the 
faUing dusk the converters flare more fiercely. Their wonder 
is mirrored in the heavens. And the mighty dx-ama of night 
in Homestead begins. 

But before you •o'itness its mechanical wonders at closer 
range, it were well to win some idea of the wealth of human 
poetry which the Old World has sent to us and concealed in 
such towns from the eyes of all but the really appreciative. 



94 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

If the pilgrim belongs among the latter, let him join fortunes 
with some polyglot pedlar (as I had the good fortune to do 
for three memorable days in McKeesport two j'ears ago), and 
follow him into the homes of the mill hands, now coaxing a 
young Croatian blade to produce a plectrum and play a wild, 
melancholy folk-tune on his native lute-like instrument, the 
iamhoura; now hearing the woeful life story of a deserted bride 
in a flaming yellow headdress straight from Servia ; now taking 
down from the lips of a venerable Bohemian babicka some pre- 
cious bit of folk-lore that has been handed down a score of 
generations by oral tradition; or coaxing some Lithuanian or 
Little Russian mother to exhibit her rare embroideries, or a 
Slovak maiden to dress up for us in the soft, high boots and 
the exquisite Sabbath finerj^ which she has brought from her 
native Hungarian valley in order to keep a touch of poetry 
near her amid the prose of a drab American mill-world. 

Then comes the spectacle of the works at night. You pre- 
sent your pass at the office and sign an ominous statement re- 
lieving the company of all responsibility for whatever disaster 
may betide you in the perilous birthplace of that metal which 
has been called "the soul of every manufacture, and the main- 
spring, perhaps, of civilized society." 

You are led, dodging trains, through a labyrinth of tracks. 
A donkey engine snorts past, drawing a car of red-hot ingots. 
Two cases full of boiling, sparkling steel occupy the front seat 
wafting streams of magic fire back over the blotchy, rubicund 
forms of the ingots. The whole affair seems like a "Seeing 
Pittsburgh" wagon filled with portly aldermen on the evening 
of the Fourth, and with two particularly patriotic "barkers" 
in front. 

You are led to the furnaces and, protected by blue glasses, 
are suffered to gaze through what is fitly called "the glory 
hole" at an infernal glory of rosy cream which bubbles straight 
upward in miniature geysers. You see the wicked stuff pour- 
ing down into the open hearths like supernal water or incan- 







V"f:'i|:- ■; yim 



'^iMsJK 






THE EDOAR THOMSON STEEL WORKS 



THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL SMOKE 97 

descent milk. Heroic figures hurl in shovelsful of manganese, 
and in reply the hearth vomits into their faces a display of hor- 
rific squibs and tawny smoke, shot through and through with 
myriad colors. 

Cyclopean ladlesful of molten steel are whisked away with 
a loud noise on cars, and rapt from the cars by derricks to fill 
rows of ingots-molds. These are tended by two men who 
stand out on a platform working levers and feeding in alumi- 
num while suffused in showers of sparks. They meet the 
sparks with that contemptuous nonchalance which appears to 
be considered de rigueur among steel workers in the presence 
of pain and peril. 

The windows of the next mill look from the outside darkness 
like the stained glass clerestory of some illuminated cathedral. 
As you approach, a fearsome din grows in such a rapid cres- 
cendo that, half in terror, you involuntarily draw back. Not 
five feet from where you enter there plunges past a red-hot 
rail spitting out sparks, arching its neck, bending its niightj' 
back blotched with black scales like some fierce sea serpent 
diving through the rollers and landing, with a snarling, howl- 
ing, deafening crash, uj^on a craggj' headland of steel. 

Now and then an ele^jhant-like thing suspended from over- 
head rails thrusts its red tongue into a hole of terror and ra- 
diance called the reheating furnace, and licks out a white-hot 
ingot that shoots with a jerk between the rolls, which re- 
semble giant clothes wringers. You gloat upon the picture 
made by the cascade of water as it pours down upon the hot, 
sliding metal almost obscuring it in a cloud of steam which is 
strangely lighted up by the glare. Total eclipse follows as 
the tail billows through for the last time and vanishes. 

As for the workers, one can never look long enough at the 
splendid puddlers who toil, half a dozen of them together, bare- 
faced, in the glare of the furnaces; or at the giants who 
straighten out sheets of steel with big sledges; or at the "catch- 
ers" whose hazardous dutv it is to catch in their tongs the 



98 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

writhing ends of the rails, as they lash the air like the tails of 
red and golden serpents, and guide them between the rolls. 
These "catchers" are very sure of eye and swift of foot. But 
if they muff one catch, the serpent is apt to sting them in the 
breast, or bite off an arm or coil itself about their throats. 

Finally you seek the high gallery at the end of a spacious 
hall where bars and beams are sawed. All at once comes 
a heart-rending hiss-crash-crunch-rumble. A brilliant shower 
of gigantic sparks whirls to the very roof from a pinwheel of 
fire. 

"That 's all," says the guide. And you have seen the heart 
of Pittsburgh beat. 



IV 

ma:m]moth cave 

A FORGOTTEX AVONDER OF THE -WORLD 

"Make bare the secret of the earth's deep heart; 
Infinite mine of adamant and gold, 
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems, 
And caverns on crystalline columns poised 
With vegetable silver overspread; 
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs 
iWhence the great sea, even as a child is fed." 

Shelley — Prometheus Unbound. 

MY preconceived notion of Mammoth Cave was 
probably derived from a jumble of primary geog- 
raphy and Jules Verne, accounts of the Cretan 
Labyrinth in words of one sjdlable and the works of 
John Uri Lloyd. I entered the Blue Grass region of Ken- 
tucky vaguely prepared to grope in long, narrow passages 
lighted now and then by convenient breaks in the ceiling, while 
unrolling behind me a scarlet thread. This alone would be 
my clue back to the world of men. 

I conceived of having to crawl on hands and knees, as Eski- 
mos crawl into their huts, into a hillside at once blue with 
grass, brown with cured tobacco leaves, and black with night- 
riders — there to swim Stygian lakes and capture great, eyeless 
fish in my bare hands. And it was, of course, with keen antici- 
pation that I looked forward to this manmioth adventure. 

Two hours and a half south of Louisville the cars set me 
dowTi in a rather typical Southern village of the smaller sort. 
The two main streets of Glasgow Junction were lined with 

99 



100 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

rows of unkempt saddle-horses and mules, hitched to rails, the 
well-gnawed profiles of which showed them to have nourished 
many a generation of Kentucky horse-flesh. 

The welcome I received was also characteristic of the Old 
South. It was even more cordial than Virginia's had been. 
Every passer-by had a courteous "Good-day, sir!" for the 
stranger. And within two blocks I was approached by a gen- 
tleman in an old sweater, corduroj^ trousers and a fortnight's 
stubble who told me all about the jjleasures and perils of seek- 
ing for hidden treasure in the hundreds of smaller caverns 
thereabouts. In the first five minutes this gentleman offered 
to become my life-long pal and to entertain me indefinitely in 
his home; in the next, and last, five, he very delicately intimated 
that if ever I found myself short of cash, it would be his 
pleasure to accommodate me with a small loan without inter- 
est. 

The privately owned line of railway from Glasgow Junc- 
tion to the Cave is like a quaint toy. I found mj'^self alone 
in a train consisting of one pre-Raphaelite car, half devoted to 
the freight and express, and half to the passenger traffic. It 
was propelled, with a scarcely perceptible motion, by a genial 
little open-faced engine of the kind one may see on those old 
print handkerchiefs designed in the stirring days when loco- 
motives were more novel than biplanes are now. 

When I expressed regret at having forgotten to stop at the 
post-office, the conductor, a young lad in plain clothes oblig- 
ingly said he would fix that all right. He opened the front door 
and called to the engineer. We stopped. The conductor saun- 
tered across the road and in a few minutes strolled back with a 
bundle of my letters which, in the leisurely Southern fashion, 
had lingered there for a few days of recuperation in their ex- 
hausting pilgrimage to the ^Mammoth Cave Hotel. The jour- 
ney of eleven miles is supposed to consume an}i:hing from one 
to three hours. Now and again we would pause for friendly 
^nsits at crossroad haunts of cracker-box clubs, their walls 



MAMMOTH CAVE 101 

propped up by leaning timbers, and with shaggy colts restive 
outside. The face of the countryside gradually altered. It 
grew more steep and solemn, more thickly sown with sink-holes, 
less unlikely to be the mask of awe-compelling mysteries. 

Presently, on being informed that the train had stopped, I 
stepped through a grove to the hotel of which the village of 
]Mammoth Cave almost exclusively consists. With the pos- 
sible exception of the Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn, this 
building now seems, in retrospect, to possess more of what 
the artists caU "atmosphere" than any other American hotel 
of my acquaintance. It is made of numerous old log cabins, 
joined in the form of a capital L, and embroidered with six 
hundred feet of piazza. 

]\Ir. Elbert Hubbard once declared that this rare caravan- 
serai "is worth the trip alone. It tells of stage-coach times and 
days when slaves were sold at auction from its broad piazzas, 
and two hundred horses were in the stables. It is Southern 
luxury in ruins. . . . The floors . . . look like the gentle bil- 
lows of a summer sea. The driveways are overgrown with 
grass, and there are three colored persons to wait on every 
guest." 

But, no more of it. For, beneath the nine logs of its hos- 
pitably blazing hearth, there arches and winds a place far 
more unique and delightful, a place so crammed with par- 
ticular wonders that even to mention — to say nothing of dis- 
cussing — all of the most striking of them would swell this 
chapter to the gross bulk of an official guide-book. 

A guide-book, also, would devote at least a chapter to the 
learned contortions of local geology. But here I shall merely 
hand on the fact that Mammoth Cave was excavated by 
undergroimd streams charged with humous acids and carbon 
dioxide, which ate away the soft limestone strata, just as the 
carbon dioxide in soda water eats into the marble slab on which 
the fountain rests. 



102 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Clad in the regulation "cave-suit" of overalls and jumper, 
I joined Josh, the guide, on the hotel veranda. He was 
strangely accoutred. Pails of oil-soaked cotton waste hung 
from his belt. The man was made of pockets; and these 
bulged with Bengal lights, Roman candles, luncheon and rolls 
of a narrow combustible ribbon which was destined to under- 
line with fierce white sputterings the more significant passages 
in the book of earth. His left hand held four rude iron lan- 
terns, one of which became mine. His right grasped an in- 
strument that looked like an underworld modification of 
Xejitune's trident. It was the torch-stick that was to impale, 
in the coming hours, myriad balls of blazing cotton; and hurl 
them with masterly aim into the blackest crannies of old night. 
Josh led the way down into a nearby ravine under strange 
branches of sycamore, spice-wood, tulip, paw-paw and Judas- 
tree. 

Soon we caught sight of the portal of the underworld. 
Above a jagged opening into the earth hung tree-shadowed 
ledges, colored a dozen moss-greens and lichen-j^ellows and 
browns, W'ith a little cascade trickling down over them and 
giving one gleam in the sunlight, only to disajjpear instantly 
into the earth, by way of reminder that there are unseen depths 
beneath even the depths of JVIammoth Cave. Through the 
boughs overshadowing the entrance I stole a final glance at the 
radiant procession of clouds in the afternoon sky. 

We set our faces nightwards. "The old Cave 's drawin' in 
her breath right smart now," warned Josh, "so when I unlock 
this here iron gate you 'd better go 'long quick or she '11 blow 
your lantern out." In a violent gale that had suddenly sprung 
up I stumbled along alone in darkness that could almost lit- 
erally be felt. Presently the guide caught up and explained 
that whenever the outer world is colder than the Cave's con- 
stant temperature of fifty-four degrees, that strange wind 
blows into the entrance; but when the world is warmer, the 
wind blows from within. 



MAMMOTH CAVE 103 

For a long distance Josh hurried me along without a word 
of explanation except that this part belonged to Number Two 
Route, whereas we were headed for Number One — The Route 
of Pits and Domes. This proved to begin at Dante's Gate- 
way, a sinister black slit in the cave-wall. Not far from the 
bit of flooring called Leopard's Rug we heard the water falling 
from INIinerva's Dome into Side-saddle Pit with a peculiar 
splitting, crashing poignance interspersed with musical tones 
of curious charm. These, by a peculiar coincidence, played 
while we stood there the opening strain of Mendelssohn's over- 
ture to Fingal's Cave. And the coincidence made me wonder 
whether melodies of this sort may not be pecuhar to falling 
water, and whether JNIendelssohn may not have obtained liis 
melody from some similar pit in the cavern in the Hebrides, 
Soon after this I discovered on the roof the portrait of a merry- 
eyed crocodile "improving his shining tail," with mouth ajar 
for Avhatever he might devour — a most admirable beast. 

They say that Gorin's Dome measures a hundred and sixty 
feet from top to bottom, and was made, like all the other 
"domes" and "pits," by a whirl of water boring straight down 
through the different levels of the Cave. At the bottom of 
this chamber, below a curtain of folded alabaster, flows "Stev- 
enson's Lost River," named for a daring Englishman who, 
lialf a century ago, had a special boat built, lowered it through 
a window in the side of the pit, and made a pioneer voyage of 
seven hours on those shadowy waters. This exploit has never 
since been repeated, although the boat still lies stranded at the 
foot of Gorin's Dome. Josh ht a ball of cotton waste and 
hurled it from the end of his torch-stick. With the flur-r-r-r 
of its upward rush, there leapt into view a distracting gamut 
of lights and shadows among Gothic shafts that lost their ex- 
tremities in the darkness. And as the flame swooped down- 
ward, the wrinkled, basalty sides of the pit gleamed — a wicked 
dark green. 

Passing through the Labyrinth, a place with sides indented 



104 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

as tliough by a Titan's thumb, I came to the Bottomless Pit and 
Shelby's Dome, and at last began to take in the vast dignity 
of this subterranean nature. The dome walls, for example, 
looked as though they had been modeled and cast in finely 
toned adamant by some supernal Rodin of the art of decora- 
tion. 

In Echo Chamber Josh showed me a musical effect even 
more curious than that of Side-saddle Pit. He stamped and 
the earth gave forth a deep, sonorous B flat that held a host 
of overtones and undertones. Then he hummed B flat through 
his nose, and, reinforced by the sympathetic vibrations of the 
chamber, his hum was "like the sound of a great amen." 

At the end of Pensacola Avenue, where, with unerring aim. 
Josh created the illusion of a fire balloon, I became aware, 
probably for the first time in my life, of perfect silence, broken 
only by a strange, surging sound as of some distant sea. That 
evening I sought Mr. Ganter, The Old Man of jNIammoth 
Cave, who was for many years manager of the estate. When 
I asked him about that sound, he told a tale at his own expense. 

"One time Dr. Hovey, the great cave authority, took 
George, the guide, and me and promised to find us water in- 
side of ten minutes if we 'd lead him to the dryest part of the 
Cave and then do just exactly as he said. I took him to 
Gothic Avenue where it 's so dry that a handful of dust '11 
fall to the ground like so much shot when you throw it up. 
Well, he made us promise not to breathe a sound till he gave 
the word, and he sent George a hundred yards down the 
passage, and me a hundred yards up. After a bit I could n't 
hardly believe my own senses. I knew Gothic Avenue 's well 
's I knew my name; but there I began to hear flowing water 
plain as day. And I forgot all about the promise and hurried 
back to the Doctor full o' my discovery. But the Doctor made 
me shut right up. Pretty soon back come George, snuffin' here 
an' there like a hound. And he cried out, 'Dey 's water here- 
abouts, boss, sure 'nough. 'Cause I done hear it!' Then the 




KNTRANTK 



MAMMOTH CAVE I07 

Doctor broke down and had a good laugh and explained to us 
that we had n't heard a droii of water. What we 'd heard was 
only our own blood runnin' through our own heads." 

There is nothing particularly enthralling about the famous 
Fat INIan's jMisery. Even as regards mere narrowness it has 
to yield the palm to one or two more stringent spatial crises 
which should, I suppose, be christened "Beanpole's Misery." 
For all that, it is diverting to obsei-\'e the high polish of the 
walls and to reflect upon how it came there. It is said that a 
large Irislmian once stuck fast in the INIisery and was left 
to his fate. But he turned up later, explaining that he had 
thought of all his sins and especially of how, in a close election, 
he had once voted the wrong ticket by mistake; and this had 
made him feel so small that he had come through with no 
further trouble. In Odd Fellows Hall, Josh, quite innocent 
of the previous chapter in this book, pointed out on the ceiling 
a calcite formation that made a map of the Allegheny and 
Monongahela rivers in their junction at Pittsburgh. 

We navigated the River Styx in a rude barge. A water- 
fall plashed accompaniment to the song of the guide who ran 
down arpeggios in a splendid, natural voice. These rims the 
echoes caught up and fused into one solid, soft miracle of a 
chord, very much as the poetic imagination takes two or three 
separate notes of life and makes of them "not a fourth sound, 
but a star." 

With a start I thought of the peaceful fields and forests 
above, where husbandmen, according to inmiemorial custom, 
were conducting their prosy, normal lives; and of flocks grazing 
and hearth-fires glowing just over our heads as we floated 
on the gloomy wonder of the Styx. 

"So near is grandeur to our dust. 
So near is God to man," 

who seldom remembers, or even suspects it, until heaven flames 
do^vn its bolts, or earth yawns beneath his feet. 



108 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Not only is grandeur and beauty near to our dust, but ter- 
ror also, as Josh brought out by interrupting these meditations 
with a tale of a man named Harvey, who once was lost in the 
Cave for thirty-six hours, "and when they found him, he was 
so wild and crazy they had to capture him and carry liim 
out." 

My idea of Charon will always be modeled upon the glim- 
mering, solitary figure of a man I saw on this river, bending 
over his rude paddle, with groups of illusory night clouds 
floating in the vault overhead, with echoes reverberating un- 
cannily round about, and the wet walls winking sinister winks 
in the flare. 

Again and again I found myself wishing that Virgil and 
Dante, INIichelangelo, Milton, Memling, Shelley, Dore, 
Stephen Phillips, and all the other artists who have portrayed 
the underworld for us might only have had the opportunity 
of beholding, before their acts of creation, this prototj'pe of all 
underwoi'lds. And I began to hope that the place might 
before long fire some American imagination to create a poem 
worthy of the land of everlasting night. 

Echo River has echoes even more charming than those of 
the Styx. And if the musical visitor tries minor, diminished 
and seventh harmonies for himself as well as the stock major 
triads which the guide so sweetly runs down, he may Avin ef- 
fects reminiscent of the boy choristers in "Parsifal." 

After splashing from the sublime to the ridiculous by cap- 
turing some of the pitiful little eyeless fish and crayfish, we 
ascended to a still higher level of the sublime — and to the 
climax of the first trip — by seeking JMammoth Dome, where — 

Down the basalt bore of the nether pit 
Columns of brooding Egyptian mold 
Peer through a void no sun has lit, 
Nor shall, till the tale of suns be told. 

The upper part of tliis dome has well been christened The 



MAMMOTH CAVE 111 

Temple of Karnak. In the glow of the red fire, the seamed, 
richly shadowed walls were as soft and tender in quality as 
any temple along the Nile. By Bengal light they were more 
ancient and solemn. Half a dozen huge columns stood about, 
at least eighty feet high and twenty-five through. And with 
their overhanging capitals they off"ered what was to my mind 
a more thrilling sight than an eruption of Vesuvius, or the 
Acropolis at sunset, or a West Indian hurricane in mid-ocean. 

There can be few more memorable experiences than to stand 
in the lower level and look up into the illuminated peak of 
^Mammoth Dome, with the smooth, noble sweeps of the walls 
breaking out suddenly into cragginess, and the silvery loops 
of the fireballs flushing as they seek the inky void below. 

From the splendor of this experience I was let down by a 
decrescendo more swift than that at the end of a Greek drama. 
Plodding on before Avith the set, gnome-like stoop of the true 
cave-man, Josh ushered me into Bandits' Hall and announced : 
"Around them corners is suitable places fer robbers to hide." 
True enough! And I noticed, grinning down from the ceiling, 
a petrified skull of the hue of bleached bones, higlily grim and 
deathlike. 

Finally, after the breathless acrobatics of a passage called 
the Corkscrew, we groped again at the iron gate, stood near 
the little cascade that flows forever do^vn over the entrance, and 
gazed up through the fringe of trees to where the stars of a 
zero night were flaming in such brilliance as I do not remember 
ever before to have seen. One could not look up at them 
without realizing afresh the old truth that only from out of 
the deepest depths may one realize the full glory of the highest 
heights. 

Before the fire that evening, ^Ir. Ganter, in reminiscent vein, 
was led to recount another trick that Dr. Hovey had played on 
him. 

"One time long ago the Doctor got a lot of us down to 
Echo River and made us promise to keep our mouths siiut 



112 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

and do 's he told us. He got us all seated on the gunwale. 
'Now rock the boat!' s' he. So we rocked like good uns; and 
pretty soon the waves commenced floppin' an' beatin' an' ham- 
merin' on the side walls. Just then I heard 'bout a thousand 
people start talkin' way back m the Cave, like I once heard 
in a Republican convention. 

"Well, say, but wa'n't I mad! 'I never thought that o' 
you!' s' I to the Doctor. And I started in accusin' him of 
takin' advantage o' my trustin' nature and o' the private key 
I had given him, to let all them folks into my Cave. But the 
Doctor jest grinned, an' me snuffin' round there like a hound 
pup; but I couldn't smell no light. (You know, sir, a cave- 
man can always track any one else by the smeU o' his lamp.) 
Then when the Doctor see I was going to bust with madness 
he told me he had n't let nobody into the Cave an' all that sound 
of talkin' was just from the little waves startin' up vibrations." 

The second of the four regulation routes through Mammoth 
Cave is not, to my mind, as consistently interesting as the first. 
There is a slight sag in the middle; and, up to the final climax, 
it is pitched throughout in a somewhat lower key. It pos- 
sesses more curious "conceits" than the first, and less dramatic 
beauty. The closing effect, however, the Star Chamber, is 
one of the most unforgetable in the whole realm of the under- 
ground world. 

Before I began this trip, ]\Ir. Ganter obligingly told me 
something about the souvenirs of the War of 1812 that I should 
see near the entrance, and called attention to this surj^rising 
passage in Hovey and Call's ^Manual: "Emphasis should be 
laid on the fact, not mentioned in any history of the United 
States, that our war with Great Britain in 1812, would have 
ended in failure on our side had it not been for the resources so 
abundantly furnished by American caverns for the home manu- 
facture of saltpeter at a time when by a general embargo we 
were wholly cut off from foreign sources of supply." 



MAMMOTH CAVE 113 

"Yes, where 'd we be to-day, I 'd like to know," cried Mr. 
Ganter, "if it wa'n't for this old cave? Why, the British 
would be spankin' us now whenever they pleased!" 

He explained the rude process by which the crystals of potas- 
sium nitrate used to be formed down in the Cave from the "peter 
dirt," and shipped on home-made ox-carts with solid wheels, 
through incredible difficulties to Pliiladelphia. When the cart- 
ers came to unfordable streams, they simply stopped and built 
rafts. "I tell you, sir, medals for heroes would n't 'a' went 
verj' far them days ; cuttin' their roads as they went, an' startin' 
for Philadeljihia — them old heroes !" 

This account lent interest to the wooden waterj)ipes made 
from hollowed trees that still lie along the floor near the en- 
trance. They were used to conduct water from the little dis- 
apjiearing cascade to the leaching vats which are still visible in 
the Rotunda. One may even see in the hxiviated earth the ruts 
worn bj' the ox-carts, and in the limestone walls, the grooves 
made by the hubs. 

Audubon Avenue, populated by clusters of sleeping bats, led 
to the engaging stalactites of Olive's Bower, curious growths, 
formed by water as it trickles through the ceiling, each slow 
drop leaving behind it before falling a fairy ring of bicarbonate 
of lime. The Bower seemed especialh^ designed as a play- 
room for the children of strange dwarf beings like Wagner's 
31 me. 

Booth's Amphitheater with its crag of a stage proved hard 
to leave. One comprehends the imi^ulse that once led Edwin 
Booth to recite a part of "Hamlet" there for his friends. In 
no building built with hands have I been more moved with 
reverence and awe than when sitting alone in that soundless 
auditorium, "a joyful sitter and applauder in an empty thea- 
ter," as Horace once sjonpathetically put it; while my patient, 
distant guide's unconscious arm with lantern pendant, cast 
upon the vault above the stage a shadow that looked like the 
arm of Jove brandishing the thunder-bolt. 



114 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

Sitting there, I began to regret that Richard Wagner never 
enjoyed such an experience. What colossal tone-drama of 
the underworld might not have resulted from his visit! It 
is easy to see that ISIammoth Cave and Wagner would have 
suited each other exactly. Because, as one strides along 
in its pure, exhilarating atmosphere, from M'onder to wonder, 
one naturally sings or whistles as a sheer emotional outlet, and, 
more often than any other music, the music of Wagner. The 
namers of the Cave have felt this affinity, too. And a pleasant 
surprise it was, after having hummed, piped and roared the 
Walhalla motif down there for days, to come, at the glorious 
end of the tliird route, upon a place actually known as "Wal- 
halla." 

On the stalagmite knob of Post Oak Pillar I discovered a 
low relief of the head of a lion, serenely asleep, and quite as 
human and lovable a creature as my merry crocodile. This 
was in Gothic Avenue, the place of the largest stalactites and 
stalagmites, many of which have met each other halfway and 
combined their forces into great pillars of limestone. Sitting 
by the base of Hercules, the largest of them, and gazing l)e- 
tween two others, which Josh, to my joy, called "Ctesar and 
Pompeii," I caught the grave, mysterious effect of red fire upon 
the group known as The Bridal Altar — tender, weird, but not 
grotesque, with little stalactites peeping down out of the cloud 
of smoke. Josh told me that fourteen couples had been mar- 
ried there. 

One of the tales connected with this Bridal Altar sounds al- 
most as folklore-ish as Shakesi^eare's story of jNIacbeth's invul- 
nerability. Dr. Hovey writes that "a Kentucky belle gave 
her heart to a gallant Southron. But her mother, Avho opposed 
the match, made her swear never to marry any man on the face 
of the earth. Shortly the lovers eloped and were hotly pur- 
sued; but before they were caught they were married in this 
novel Gretna Green. Taxed with her broken pledge, the bride 
replied: 'JNIother, dear, it was not marrying any man "on the 



J 



MAMMOTH CAVE 117 

face of the earth" to wed my own true love in this underground 
chapel.' " 

The Water Clock was nothing but a little basin into which 
there fell in measured sequence — and probably had fallen since 
ages before the first bud burst in the hanging gardens of Baby- 
lon — one clear-voiced drop of water after another. The Clock 
was as obliging as the cascade from IVIinerva's Dome had been. 
For, while we sat resting, it was kind enough to play us, quite 
clearly and blithely, Beethoven's "Hj'mn to Joy." 

The far-famed statue of jNIartha Washington proved to be a 
freak of nature caused by two obliquely opposite walls inter- 
fering with a full view of one illuminated face of the cavern. 
Josh operated his light, and there she was, in the body, — 
a body, however, wlaich scarcely did justice to her traditional 
buxomness, though it snuggled down upon its pedestal 
as every well-trained statue should. As for her features, they 
were turned away. But no right-minded American, could en- 
tertain an instant's doubt that this was the veritable mother of 
all our grand dames herself. 

Giant's Coffin looked like a huge marble violin-case sculp- 
tured as richly in relief as one of Benvenuto Cellini's shields. 
And the ant-eater in silliouette above it recalled what an old 
Kentuckian had remarked the daj' before: "From Giant's 
Coffin to Acute Angle is where Noah done his advertisin'. 
You kin see most any animal you 've a mind to there — ^leopards, 
buffaloes, ant-eaters, an' such like." We passed the burly devil 
of a section-boss who is on the ceiling bellowing to his crew; 
and tlie stone cottages that commemorate the disastrous at- 
tempt of a colony of consumptives to recover their health in 
exile from the sun. Then came what to Emerson seemed "the 
best thing which the cave had to offer," — the hall 

Where clouds in a phantom sky are rolled. 
Illumined by ghostly galaxies. 

It was called The Star Chamber. Josh seated me on a 



118 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

bench, took my light, and left me in gross darkness. As pre- 
sented by such a great guide as he, the ensuing drama proved of 
breathless interest. By little and little the opjiression of the 
utter blackness seemed to lighten. The ink of the vault over- 
head turned to a deep, atmospheric blue in which faint stars 
presently dawned, as though one were looking up from the 
depths of some unimaginably deep canyon. Presently, just 
as in Emerson's experience, more than half a century before, "I 
saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars . . . 
and even what seemed like a comet flaming among them." 
What cared I for the secret knowledge that these orbs, illu- 
mined by Josh's lights from behind a hidden corner, were sul- 
phate of magnesia showing through a dark coating of manga- 
nese dioxide? No doubt Arcturus and Orion and the Pleiades 
themselves might also be reduced on the dusty lips of science to 
formulas equally chemical. 

I cared only to enjoy the brightening comet and the cloud- 
wracks that swept across the heavens, to be blown away so that 
the stars now grew doubly brilliant until they recalled those 
which we had seen the evening before at the cavern's mouth. 
Then suddenly — total eclipse. After a whollj^ indeterminate 
time, dawn began to flush the east, as though to illustrate the 
lines of Keats that were ringing in memory: 

"Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light. 
And precipices show untrodden green; 
There is a budding morrow in midnight ; 
There is a triple sight in blindness keen." 

Then, lest one's spirit should be rapt too far from this earth, 
the ventriloquial Josh gave a spirited presentment of the com- 
edy of rural sunrise, with the reiterant rooster, the eager yaps 
of the dog, his disappointment and rebuff, the waking cat and 
her short but decisive encounter with Fido. Then footsteps, 
and the eager voice and eyes of Josh wished me the top of the 
morning and hoped I had approved of his little masterpiece. 



MAMMOTH CAVE 119 

After wonders like these to emerge suddenly into the beams 
of noonday is like turning the common-sense light of humor 
abruptly upon an overwrought small-hour mood. You have 
been viewing all the architecture of Golconda and remote 
Cathay, with your eye "in a fine frenzy rolling." All at once 
you come to the little cascade over the entrance. And the dear, 
common sunlight, ghnting so genially in its spray, seems to 
make sport of everj^thing divorced from the calm tenor of man's 
dailj' life. 

!Much can be urged in favor of making these first two trips 
with a party, rather than alone. It is more amusing, and is 
apt to shed an instructive illumination upon various obscure re- 
cesses of human nature. Almost at once the unconventional 
appearance of the bloomered ladies and the jimipered gentle- 
men smashes the social ice. And the inevitable incident of the 
faint-hearted member who always insists on turning back when 
well within the awesome portal, binds the remainder closer in 
the tie of a superior courage. Of course each party is bound 
to include a chronic wag, a chronic pessimist, a chronic victim 
of blasedom, a preacher, a spoony couple and a hysterical dame, 
who, when the lights are being taken away in the Star Chamber, 
is sure to shriek to the guide: "Oh, come back! Please, come 
right back!" until she is soothed by the invisible efforts of her 
escort. Then the wag is sure to start a ghost story, thus bring- 
ing the escort's efforts completelj' to nought. ]\Iob psycholog}'^ 
begins to work, and the party faces a real emotional crisis until 
some inspired genius bethinks himself of lighting a match. All 
this is undoubtedlj' edifying. But it provides something less 
than the ideal atmosphere for one who would assimilate the 
sweet influences of the subterranean stars. 

Again, it is a diverting experience to assist some squat ward 
])olitician from Cincinnati through the straight and narrow way 
of Fat ^Man's Misery, and witness the extremities to which he 
is put in the violent reconstruction of his own corporation law 



120 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

— and his shiny face when at last he emerges into the Great 
Relief. Then there is the joy of hearing the inevitable dis- 
eussion as to whether this experience reminds one most of 
"She," or "King Solomon's Mines," or "The Great Stone of 
Sardis" or "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." 
And it is also worth remark to see how long it -wiW be before 
some one, with an air of indignant originality, will begin to 
utter reflections on the comparatively small number of folk 
who visit the Cave nowadays; and will end: "What 's the mat- 
ter with us Americans, anyway ? Why, this here 's the eighth 
wonder of the world!" 

This sort of thing is all very amusing; and on the first two 
trips the human interest perhaps atones for the lessened oppor- 
tunity of appreciating the Cavern's solemn beauty and impres- 
siveness. But on the third trip let no one go party-wise who 
can possibly manage to secure a guide all for himself. The 
wonders of Chief and Violet Cities are too ineffable to run the 
risk of their profanation at tlie hands of a flippant or callous 
crowd. 

This third trip, to my mind, is the most satisfactory of the 
four ; though much of its satisfaction would doubtless be lost if 
one had not gone over the previous routes. It is pitched more 
in the grandly tragic key. And I am free to confess that the 
two "cities" near its end took hold of my imagination more than 
an}i:hing else in the Cave excepting a certain tiny, gypsum- 
flower-garlanded chamber which I happened upon in the course 
of later explorations. But of that in its place, as Robinson 
Crusoe would say. 

It seemed almost like a piece of burlesque to be walking down 
the idyllic woods-path from the hotel, and, with no suspicion of 
a cavern's mouth in sight, to be conversing in matter-of-fact 
tones about Karnak, Lethe, Ultima Thule, Walhalla, and so 
on. But one glimpse of the yawning portal brought every- 
thing into key. 

Beyond Procter's Arcade I looked back through a vast black 



MAMMOTH CAVE 121 

and white vaulted cavern, where masses of rock had been slung 
about in savage confusion, as though his Satanic majesty had 
been having a set-to with a band of Cyclops. What a fitting 
haunt, I thought, for the horrific, primeval bear-monster of 
Conan Doyle's story! One could almost catch the sickening 
odor of musk, and the reverberance of his growl. It would 
have been an ill place for faint-hearted dames to choose, in 
which to stray from the party. 

In the Snow Chamber Josh and I were most medicinally 
snowed upon by flakes of Epsom salts, detached from the roof 
by the heat of our lamps. And in the Floating Cloud Room 
there opened abrupth^ overhead a skyful of mackerel clouds in 
yellow, cream, white, pale green and delicate rose, painted on 
a flat, Tudor vault. 

Presently I noticed several sticks protruding from crevices in 
the ceiling ten yards above. "^ly idee is," answered Josh in 
resjDonse to a query, "that them old Indians that used to come 
in here all the time got foohn' round and playin' like boys will, 
and lodged them lances and arrows up there. Look! See that 
biggest one of all? We call that 'Teddy's Stick.'" To 
strengthen his theory, he pointed out many heaps of half-burnt 
fragments of the reeds which the Indians once used to fill with 
bear oil and earn,' as torches. And he spun enticing yarns of 
the pipes, moccasins, stone axes, tomahawks and Indian graves 
that had been found nearby. We then took a short recess and 
turned archeologists. 

Then came Wright's Rotunda, a chaotic, primeval chamber, 
and the largest in the Cave. It was five hundred feet long, 
three hundred and fifty feet wide and forty-five feet high. 
Bulging, undermined walls, shot through with Romanesque 
church Avindows, confronted the ungainly bulk of Samson's 
Pillar opposite, which, as evidenced by a prostrate mass of 
dripstone, Samson had only half pulled down before the Phi- 
listines fell upon him again. From a distance the sparkling 
sound of cataracts vibrating through the sleepy air, produced 



122 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

on the ear much the same effect that carbonic acid gas produces 
on the palate. 

Underfoot was the pleasant, metallic clink-clink of slab on 
loose slab as we approached Chief City. Above a mound of 
rocks appeared a crescent of deep blue evening sky, bounded by 
a sort of proscenium arch. It was a portal worthy of the 
ancient council-chamber of the Black Hawks — the hall of Con- 
gress of the first Americans. 

We breasted the rise and there came into view a skyful of 
clouds. Here Josh left a can of red fire for me to touch off 
when he should give the word, and went down alone into Chief 
City with another can, bent on a double illumination. For the 
hall is so large that it has never yet been properly photographed, 
and an expert has told me that a proper flashlight of it would 
need fifty dollars' worth of powder. 

Out of the darkness came a shout. The two fuses spat. 
And there leaped into day a more wildly solemn, heart-com- 
pelling amphitheater than any that ever saw the graybeards of 
the Areopagus assemble or witnessed one of those titanic con- 
tests of poetry between the bard of "Prometheus Bound" and 
the "singer of sweet Colonus." Here curved no ordered 
benches of polished Pentelic marble; here was no cunningly 
wrought stage, no conventional exit or entrance, no central 
altar to Dionysus. The elements themselves piled the or- 
chestra and ordered the proscenium. Geological periods and 
the streams of Tartarus placed that great white throne of the 
Chief on its commanding eminence. The everlasting arms I 
themselves reached up to limn on the vault those awe-compell- 
ing frescoes. i 

And men speak contemptuously of America as a land with- I 
out a past ! Would that I might take all such for five minutes ' 
to Chief City and make them proud to be scions of this land of 
elemental traditions. I began to think with regret of the good 
old days before the war, when all true Americans, who could 
travel, instead of rushing madly through Rome, Paris and 




IIII.K ITI'V 



i 



MAMMOTH CAVE 125 

London as they now do, took pride in having seen some of the 
marvels and beauties of the homeland first. That was the day 
when an American's education was scarcely considered com- 
plete before he had crossed the Styx and gazed upon Star 
Chamber and Chief City. That was the day when one was 
liable to meet on the broad hotel piazzas such folk as Daniel 
Webster, Jenny Lind, Emerson, Everett, Ole Bull and Dom 
Pedro. A president once visited here with four members of 
his cabinet and for a week turned ISIammoth Cave into the capi- 
tal of the United States. To-day JNIammoth Cave means little 
more to the average American than the Colossus of Rhodes or 
the Egyptian Pharos. Why has it been allowed to lapse into 
such neglect? Has it degenerated? On the contrary the re- 
cent discoveries make it half again as interesting. Perhaps the 
truth is that in these days the average citizen finds hfe on the 
surface sufficiently strenuous without venturing into any sub- 
terranean Corkscrew. 

Ultima Thule used to be thought a blank wall which ended 
ISIammoth Cave. But now, as happened once before in the 
days of Columbus, Ultima Thule has become but the point of 
departure for a new, and fairer, world. For in 1908 the ex- 
plorers, Kaemper and Bishop, wormed their way through this 
wall into a more beautiful part of the Cave than had ever before 
been known. Even the Indians had not suspected its existence, 
as is shown by the absence of torch-ends. Too bad! How 
it would have appealed to their si^lendid, primitive imagina- 
tions! Even now one would like to make up in j)art for their 
loss by taking a band of their descendants through the newly 
discovered region. 

The first view of Violet City from Elizabeth's Dome, by the 
flare of the Bengals, was a revelation. Far beneath yawned a 
half cone of pit. From this, walls crowded with immortal 
sculi)tures sprang to a vault crowned with the uttermost g[or\' 
of shadow, and with three masses of exquisite white onyx, fluted 
and shinmiering with myriad crystals. Here at last was Wal- 



12G ROMANTIC AMERICA 

halla, with the lure of its jNIarble Temple of alabaster stalac- 
tites. The tawnv columns of smoke from the lights led the eve 
upward to where, above these terrestrial and sub-terrestrial 
splendors, the Alps, in blue and pale emerald, and dazzling 
snow-color, shimmered in the hues of dawn, which flushed the 
vastnesses beyond Grand Portal and revealed temple shafts 
strewn over this indescribably rugged wilderness, while the 
sound of an Alpine cataract made music in our ears. 

When one is late and hungry and half way home, it takes a 
considerable fund of curiosity to enter upon the side-trip to 
Fairy Grotto. One is told, that the place is not visited once in 
ten years. But the expedition was worth while. After we had 
crawled with pain on hands and knees through a considerable 
length of passages, and had scrambled through a very rough 
one with its walls ribbed "as is the ribbed sea-sand," it was 
pleasant to wander about familiarly among the good and evil 
fairies, the gnomes, elves, pixies, and Robin Good fellows of the 
Grotto. And the detour proved an excellent modulation from 
the sublimities of Violet City. With Violet City fresh in one's 
mind, the mere mundane world might have proved too violent 
an anticlimax. Perhaps, though, it was a needless precaution. 
For it is curious how, after a long outward trip is over and you 
turn your face towards home, much of the mystery and ro- 
mance of the imderworld seems to vanish in a trice with the 
flares, the fire-balls and the questing sjiirit and you might al- 
most be trudging along to supper from the suburban train. 

Not until after the third trip did I learn that Abraham Lin- 
coln's mother was raised on the hollow shell of rock above ]Mam- 
moth Cave. "Yes," declared jNIr. Ganter, "old man Plunmier 
Doyle told me that Nancy Hanks came from right near this 
hotel. He often used to say to me, 'Yes, Nancy was a peart 
gal!' I gathered that they'd once been sweethearts." 

Mr. Ganter told me, further, that the Lincoln farm was 
only sixty miles away, and expressed the passionate conviction 



MAMMOTH CAVE 127 

that Congress ought to get hold of the Cave and all the inter- 
vening country and make of the whole tract a national park, 
thus joining Lincoln's old home to that of his mother. He 
informed me that, as soon as the last of its now aged owners is 
gone, jNIammoth Cave will be sold at public auction to the 
highest bidder. And I agreed with his vehement opinion that 
"it would be a disgrace for the government to let this wonderful 
curio, tliis underground world, go into private hands." If only 
for the sake of preserving the Cave's coloring, which is fast be- 
ing spoiled by a reckless use of torches and fireworks, it is 
devoutly to be wished that the property may be nationalized. 

The fourth route is longer than the other three, and is, to my 
mind, somewhat less interesting. Its chief attraction lies in 
the gypsum flower gardens, and even these have been more or 
less discolored by smoke. In order to save a few words for the 
more fascinating regions that lie outside of the regular routes, 
this one shall be summarily sketched. 

Cascade Hall and Minnehaha Falls were laid out by the 
prime Architect somewhat in the style of such rococo grottos 
as one may see in the grounds of the palace at IMunich or Nym- 
phenburg. They gave me an impression of almost mincing 
artificiality, which Avas scarcely effaced by the effect of Serpent 
Hall, where a family of boa-constrictors writhes forever in in- 
taglio on the pallid roof. 

Ole Bull's Concert Hall has a splendid resonance. It would 
be just the place to bring an amateur string quartet party; 
though I, for one, would shrink from the task of manipulating 
a 'cello through the Corkscrew. The unfortunate 'cellist would 
have the satisfaction of knowing, however, that he was follow- 
ing "after the Great Companions." For many rare musicians 
have performed these intricate cave passages before him. And 
farther on in this very trip one is shown a large gypsum bloom 
called The Last Rose of Summer because it was there that 
Jennv Lind sat and sang her famous encore. 



128 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Suicide Rock gives tlie guide a chance for one of the stock 
cave witticisms. "Why is it called Suicide?" you ask, like 
thousands before you. And the answer is: "Cause it started 
to fall and hung itself." The guides have a shrewd wit of their 
own, though. One day I inquired rather fatuously of Josh, 
"Are you like your famous god-father? Can you make the sun 
stand still?" "No, sir," was the ready answer of this true 
Kentuckian, "but I can make the moon-shine." 

With edification I beheld twin shadow portraits of George 
Washington and spouse. The only trouble with the likeness 
was that George closely resembled the haughty portraits of 
Lord North in the old school histories; while ]Martha was a 
perfect combination of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mrs. Grundy. 

Presently the ceiling merged into the fairy roof of Flora's 
Garden, full of soft, exotic blooms of gypsum: large white lilies 
with yellow hearts, smaller chrysanthemums, tuberoses, great 
sunflowers, roses, camellias. The very floor glistened with 
fragments of flowers shattered by too greedy tourists. 

Beyond a grotto with wretched acoustics, named — as a prac- 
tical joke I suppose — for poor Saint Cecelia, the regal vault of 
the Vale of Diamonds sparkled down upon us. The walls of 
Cleaveland's Cabinet proved even richer in color than the Rain- 
bow Walls. These were resplendent in yellows, blues, pale 
greens and a whole gamut of whites, all shot through with dia- 
mond fires. 

Long before one has finished all of the official sights of Mam- 
moth Cave, he becomes so satiated with wonder, mystery, awe, 
serene beauty, and even the grotesque and the terrible (which 
includes countless traces of that hunter after cheap immortality, 
the name-scratching, monument-raising tourist), — he grows 
emotionally so jaded that it takes some quite extraordinary 
spectacle to move him. What would, in the course of every-day 
life, appeal to him as one of the most remarkable little altar 
niches in the world, exquisitely bedecked with rare gypsum 



MAMMOTH CAVE 131 

flowers and set with onyx and all sorts of semi-precious stones, 
— now has no power at all over his paralyzed emotions. 

It is a rare privilege to travel the Cave's regulation routes; 
and still rarer to combine with these the difficult side-trips. 
But all this cannot for one moment compare with the joy of 
exploring unknown parts of the underworld for oneself. 

More than an hundred and fifty miles of passages have al- 
ready been explored. But there remains a good amount of 
suh-ierra incognita on which — as the colored divine once put it 
— "the hand of man has never set foot." In fact, the man who 
first suggested to Kaemper and Bishop the idea of seeking a 
passage beyond Ultima Thule, has assured me that there are 
yet more Violet Cities awaiting their Columbuses in the vicinity 
of Gorin's Dome. 

From a knowledge of traditions and records dating back to 
the Cave's discovery in 1797, from the absence of Indian torch- 
ends and of boot-marks in the sand and on the delicate bloom 
of the rocks and flowers, and from the absence of the special 
hieroglyphs which the regular explorers always leave beliind 
them — my guide was able to tell with assurance the point at 
which we began passing from the known regions to the un- 
known. 

Over treacherous, loose rocks we lowered ourselves down 
into a jagged pit. We tested each rock with some care. For, 
as Bob, the guide, clearly put it, "If one o' them rocks gives, 
you 'U go down first and it on top o' you, an' there won't be no 
kick comin' time you land at the bottom." We arrived at a 
little hall full of fine stalactites and rich in onyx. Then the 
passage narrowed to a hole that would have given pause to a 
fair-sized pigmy. But we rolled down rocks to hear the distant 
crashings, and flung down fireballs whose infernal flarings deep 
in the bowels of the earth we could dimly make out. 

Another line of exploration led to a miniature hall decorated 
in chalk color and groin-vaulted like a German rathskeller. At 



132 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

the sound of the torch I threw in, mine host, a fat blind cricket, 
came waddling to the door in some haste to greet these modern 
Prometheuses of his ancient world. Farther along I tried to 
squeeze an entrance into a most alluring lead, and would have 
succeeded if endowed with a half inch less of girth. As it was, 
I stuck fast and had to be hauled out by the heels. That half 
inch will always remain a dear regret. What wonders might 
not have burst upon the fevered vision of a yet more meager 
explorer; what El Dorado might have fed his lean and himgry 
look; what super-violet cities nught have been lurking there for 
the delectation of his first of mortal eyes ! 

As compensation Bob led the way to a still more remote pas- 
sage, and pointed to a crevice almost exactly one half inch 
larger. As he was thirty pounds my better in weight I abased 
myself alone to the dust; wormed, pushed, writhed, squeezed, 
and at last felt the satisfaction of progress at full length along a 
way which nobody had ever chosen before me, and which nobody 
of any ampler proportions would ever choose after me. Hitch- 
ing the lamp ahead at every few contortions, I gained inch 
after inch, snugly bounded, back and front and sides, by Mam- 
moth Cave. 

As I have never been expert in the traditional method by 
which politicians, women and crabs are supposed to make prog- 
ress forward by going backward, I began to hope that this lane 
would develop a more spacious turning. After what seemed 
like an eternity in embryo this hope was luckily fulfilled, and I 
emerged with a supreme wrench into a chamber eight by six by 
four. It was studded with sparkling crystals and gay with 
bouquets of yellow and white flowers that had never known 
the desecration of smoke, all interspersed with coral-like for- 
mations and things resembling Indian hieroglyphs mosaiced 
in quartz in the bed-rock of ages. 

In one corner, staring down on me was just such a great all- 
seeing eye as, when a child, I used to fear was watching my 
every move. And with the feeling that "I was the first that 



MAMMOTH CAVE 133 

ever burst" into that little chapel of silence and old time, there 
came a strange and awful sense of communion with the primal 
verities. I felt that I, rash interloper, was seeing things that 
no eye had in all probability ever beheld since the continent 
first shuddered from out the waste of waters wnth the primeval 
slime thick upon it. 

A gladder and a wiser man I bit the dust of the homeward 
trail. 



V 

YELLOWSTONE PARK 

god's old curiosity shop 

THIS shop would not be the truly western thing that it 
is if it were not the "greatest on earth." It boasts 
more than three thousand square miles of floor space 
on the top story of the continent, at the corner where 
Wyoming, INIontana and Idaho meet. The concern does not 
confine itself to curios, but deals in staples as well, and in a 
rather large way. It keeps in a special show-case the loftiest 
of our large lakes. It distills, puts up and promptly delivers 
both to the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts the greatest Amer- 
ican rivers. It does an extensive landscape gardening busi- 
ness in glacier and beaver meadows, sweepnig forests, delect- 
able valleys, streams alive with trout and a-roar with rapids: — 
always throwing in at the psychological moment some stupend- 
ous waterfall or Rocky mountain to clinch the bargain. 

But the shop's most striking feature is its line of curios. 
Though you have to pay in advance, everything is absurdly 
reasonable. At the price of a little time, strength, enthusiasm 
and labored breathing on Uncle Sam's congress-neglected 
roads, you may ramble over the premises, selecting whatever 
you like from an almost limitless stock. 

Perhaps you may fancy a large bowl of rainbow-colored tra- 
vertine, brimmed with bubbling water of a dozen heavenly hues, 
and fringed below with spindles set in the shape of an hour- 
glass, — spindles that look like icicles but contain steam instead 
of sand. This you may acquire on the terms above mentioned 
and carry away tucked conveniently under your hat. 

134 



YELLOWSTONE PARK 135 

Or you may, when next you turn your face towards work, 
take along in the same botherless manner, and plant in front 
of your tall office building, a wild fountain of boiling glory, 
which is not so wild, however, but that it will look in hourly at 
you through the upper windows, scouring the panes to crystal, 
and, as if to saj' : 

Oh, work 's not all 

That to a man doth fall — 

shake out again before your eyes its throbbing banners of iris- 
broidered snow. 

If your taste run to even more practical things you might 
care to acquire a paint-mixer that never ceases mixing warm 
colors for the Futurist painters and their "brushes of comet's 
hair," — a machine, indeed, that was already at work with the 
same German conscientiousness several asons before the first 
pre-Adamite Futurist thought to sketch the primal fish-story 
upon the walls of his cave. Perhaps you are a politician and 
would prefer an automatic mud-slinger that has been in regular 
use since long before the first presidential campaign, is of a 
thousand steam-roller power, and is manipulated by Old Nick 
himself. 

Or if your interests are scientific you might choose a serial 
forest in stone, pubHshed hke a chocolate cake with lava icing 
between the successive chapters, or layers, of quartz, jasper and 
amethyst trees, — trees that have suffered an earth-change into 
semiopal and flint, banded agate and carnelian, prase and 
chrysoprase. 

In God's old curiosity shop there are drinking fountains of 
Apollinaris in several of the aisles, for your use and that of your 
fellow customers, the friendly bear, buffalo, deer, elk, antelope, 
eagle and pelican. And nobody has to purchase checks at the 
desk. Then there is the unique hill department. No house 
ever before carried such a comprehensive line. They range 
all the way from fourteen thousand foot peaks, through 



136 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

scrapped volcanoes, glass cliffs, sulphur mountains, mountains 
stewed and baked and fricaseed, par-boiled and soft-boiled, 
down through steaming, smoking geyser cones, to modest 
mounds of strenuous water wherein you can unlawfully cook 
your new-caught trout without troubling to move from your 
tracks, — that is, if the soldiers are not lurking near. 

I entered this shop by the ^Montana door, prepared, like a 
habitue of such haunts, to expend my capital of strength and 
enthusiasm on only a few supreme specimens from among the 
million desirable objects on display. The first pause was at 
IMammoth Hot Springs. These springs flow down a hill-side 
and make it look, from a distance, somewhat like a small glacier 
in its Sundaj' clothes. Subtle, silent quarrymen that they are, 
they hide in their liquid, transparent bosoms the building ma- 
terials for their hundred-hued terraces and bowls of limestone, 
brimmed with water so beautiful that it might well have found 
its way there direct from the Fountain of Life. 

The moment I set eyes on the one called HjTnen I saw again 
as in Pittsburgh, that Solomon was wrong, — that there really 
is something new under the sun. It was an epitome of the 
whole group, — this cluster of little semi-translucent terraces 
which the genius loci had so cunningly fluted and draped, em- 
broidered and sculptured and toned in red-browns and yellows 
and pearls, not so remarkable for brilliance as for tender radi- 
ance and the way they modulated one into another. From the 
uppermost plane a cloud of steam like altar incense rose from a 
pink and orange bordered pool. The thing might have been 
an architect's working model for some unlieard of inspiration 
in the way of hanging gardens. 

Unlike most of the other Yellowstone curios, these terraces 
are new. Some part of them is fresh every hour. They are 
forever demoHshing their older architecture and building them- 
selves more stately mansions and decorating them inside and 
out in absolutely original styles. The beauty of the established 



YELLOWSTONE PARK 137 

order here is as impermanent as that of autumn. Whatever 
the warm rills cease to wash is doomed. Hymen, for instance, 
is only six years old, and already the gray teeth of death have 
taken large bites out of it. An old resident of the Springs 
took me to see another terrace and found, to his astonisliment, 
that it had perished and returned well on its way to the dust 
within a single year. But fortunately the law of compensation 
obsen-es in this region the seven day week. And for every 
wonder that dies, it rears in the most unexpected place, a new 
and more wondrous wonder, "greater than before known." 
Even in decay this architecture was interesting. Certain dead 
parts of Jupiter Terrace recalled the ruins of ancient Olympia 
and some of the more demolished b}'waj's of Pompeii. Else- 
where, though, the suggestion was less romantic. One part 
had peeled off in large flakes that were reminiscent of what the 
ceiling at home does when the bathtub overflows in the apart- 
ment above. The man who remarked that these terraces looked 
as though they had been up all night must, I tliink, have ex- 
amined only such moribund portions as these. 

He could not have looked at Jupiter's live parts. When I 
approached these from above, the gray and ruddy plane upper- 
most was resplendent with three springs colored respectively 
green, purple, and the heavenly blue of Lake Tahoe; and all 
were tossing up plumes of steam to float over the formation. 
These springs were wrapped in a glad calm that became excited 
only where they billowed do^^^l over slopes of salmon and 
orange travertine. They gained in glamour when INIt. Everts, 
their background, was turned gray by a passing squall, and 
when it greAV purple in the dusk. And I began to wonder why 
our landscape gardeners and decorators do not come for sug- 
gestions to the Yellowstone. I would like, for example, to have 
had them see Angel Terrace by the intermittent flashes of a 
thunder storm. Under the flowing waters there then appeared 
exactly such soft, radiant creams and roses and whites as I had 
seen in the Homestead furnaces, looking through the "glory- 



138 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

hole" at the bubbling steel. Everywhere on the hillside, clad 
in a color-ecstasy, hung rows of spindhng stalactites and steam- 
ing icicles that looked as though a breaker had been caught 
foaming and combing in a hundred separate streams over some 
ledge in a sunset sea, — and been turned to stone at the fall of a 
witch's wand. 

Tliis witch, by the way — even though so near Angel 
and Pulpit Terraces — would feel quite at home among the 
JNIammoth Hot Springs — what with Stygian Cave which 
poisons the birds, and McCartney's Cave which traps the elk 
and hangs them by their own horns. The old lady might do 
her housekeeping in the Devil's Kitchen. To see this I climbed 
down a ladder into a narrow pot wliich used to boil, but has 
now ceased, probably because all the water has boiled away. 
The temperature of its ghoulish depths made me wish for the 
comparative coolness of Turkish baths. Pale bats wliirred 
past. 

I gazed up at a peapod of sky where I almost seemed to 
make out stars, and wondered how it would be if the witch 
should suddenly come back and turn on the hot water. Such 
things, though, were merely occasional gargoyle-shadows ujjon 
this radiant little mount of marvels. 

From Mammoth Hot Springs my way threaded a pair of 
natural portals — the weird Silver Gate and the stately Golden 
Gate — to geyserdom. A hill of volcanic glass loomed up. 
Here the stage-driver re-spun one of the famous yarns of Jim 
Bridger, the Yellowstone pioneer. One day Jim saw a huge 
elk on this very spot. He fired, but the beast never budged. 
He crept closer and fired once more. The elk "paid no 'ten- 
tion." Now Jim was a dead shot and this hurt his pride. He 
blazed away at closer and closer range, but always with the 
same result. The elk did not even seem to notice the reports. 
In a rage Jim clubbed his rifle and made a dash for the beast, — 
only to bring up against a hill of pure glass. He found it was 
no ordinary glass hill, either. It proved to be nothing less than. 




I.OOKINT. nnwN Till-; cit and c asvdn uk thi: ^ i.i.i.ow siom. 



YELLOWSTONE PARK 141 

a gigantic telescope lens. And that elk was in reality twenty- 
five miles away on the other side I 

From this point on, the signs of dying volcanic activity in- 
creased in curiosity and fervor. Roaring INIountain looked hke 
a feeble-minded volcano-let, and sounded like a yardful of 
freight engines. We passed a natural frying-pan, — the 
Devil's, of course. For it is notorious that its owner, though 
he goes up and down the earth seeking whom he may devour, 
is always thrifty enough to spirit his victim back to this free 
hearth before saj'ing grace and falling to. Such things as 
these gradually fortified me for the supreme curiosity of all — 
the geyser basins. 

Over the forest floated the reek of a hundred factories. 
From a distance it appeared that Nature was trying to imitate 
Pittsburgh. Then the coach rolled out upon a reassuring ex- 
panse of pearl-gray pavement built by the springs out of traver- 
tine rock and a sihcious stone called sinter. It was a wide plaza 
almost translucent in the sunlight and painted here and there a 
dozen rare hues by rudimentary plants, the algse, that inhabit 
warm, flowing waters. Dotted here and there upon it were 
steaming bowls and craters that looked now like the shattered 
bell of an imimaginable hunting horn, now like a huge petrified 
toad, a sequoia stump, or a small castle descended from some 
robber baron of medievalism. 

Presently there sounded under foot three hollow thuds. 
They jarred the valley floor. It was as though the stage man- 
ager of the earth genii below were announcing the commence- 
ment of the play. Warned, I turned and fled for dear life. 
Over my shoulder I saw a column of boiling water make tenta- 
tive upward movements, like an athlete preparing to put the 
shot. Sh-s-s-s-s! Abruptly a white shaft of water, veiled in a 
duller envelope of steam, sprang two hundred feet into the air, 
and stayed for a while transfixed like myself. After the cur- 
tain was rung down, although I did not follow the example of 
the girl who confessed that she had stood there "just drinking 



142 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

it all in," at least I was sure of having turned over a new leaf 
into a novel and engrossing chapter of nij' travels. Then and 
there I took down from my mental shelf and ran over again 
John INIuir's splendid prose poem in which he compared these 
geysers to the things he loved best, to trees that stand there 
"hissing, throbbing, booming, as if thunderstorms were raging 
beneath their roots, their sides roughened or fluted like the fur- 
rowed boles of trees, their tops dissolving in feathery branches, 
while the irised spray, like misty bloom is at times blown aside, 
revealing the massive shafts shining against a background of 
pine-covered hills. . . . No frost cools them, snow never covers 
them nor lodges in their branches; winter and summer they 
welcome alike ; all of them, of whatever form or size, faithfully 
rising and sinking in fairy rhythmic dance night and day . . . 
uncontrollable as fate, tossing their pearly branches in the wnd, 
bursting into bloom and vanishing like the frailest flowers, — 
plants of which Nature raises hundreds or thousands of crops a 
year with no apparent exhaustion of the fiery soil." 

The geyser (Icelandic for "gusher") is the chief feature of 
the Yellowstone and is an exact inversion of the Yosemite Val- 
ley's chief feature, the waterfall. There cold water gushes 
down. Here hot water gushes up. Even for those who have 
lived longest in the Park I found that the geysers were foun- 
tains of perennial interest, — yes, even for the blase hotel clerk 
himself. Every one was on the chronic qui vive for eruptions; 
and the faintest unusual sound would bring all hands to the 
doors of Old Faithful Inn with cries of: 

"That must be the Giant!" 

"How about Splendid? Perhaps he 's opened up again after 
all these years." 

"It 's Oblong, believe me." 

"Why, you idiot, can't you see the Castle?" 

Disj)uting, gesticulating like a crowd of French schoolboys, 
they would surge out for a better view, and discover from the 



YELLOWSTONE TARK 145 

slight tilt of the boiling stem that it was only the Daisy indulg- 
ing in an unusually luxuriant spell of blossoming. 

As a rule the traveler fills up the intervals of geyser activity 
by inspecting a milUon or more of lesser curios until he sud- 
denly drops, stricken with acute Baedekeritis. To spare the 
reader a like fate I shall skip with him lightly over most of the 
mush pots and broth kettles and punch-bowls, the mud vol- 
canoes, fumaroles, infernal cooking utensils and Devils' Bath 
Tubs. Indeed, amid the washday atmosphere of the two 
lower geyser basins, we shall glance only at the Mammoth 
Paint Pots. 

Approacliing these you are aware of a nervous, guttural 
muttering, as if a group of fresh German immigrants were try- 
ing to carry on an English argument in an overwrought under- 
tone. Then you behold a large puddle of violently boiling mud 
whose unmodern color scheme ranges chastely between a pallid 
salmon and the sickly cast of white lead. A smaller pool shows 
a moon face and two goggling, bubbling eyes which wink you 
warm winks in alternation. And nearby is a jjit that does noth- 
ing age after age but disgorge accurately dotted exclamation 
points, interlarded with mud lilies. 

Old Faithful Inn, that largest and fairest of log palaces, pro- 
vides a comfortable center in the Upper Basin from which to 
visit the most noteworthj'^ of what might collectively be called 
the Bubbleations. A few minutes are enough to show what 
ticklish work it is wandering unguided about this region. Un- 
less attention is kept at strain you are at any moment liable to 
encrust yourself with terrestrial oatmeal, to enter upon a hot 
mud treatment more heroic than curative, to break through ap- 
parent bed-rock into unplumbed paint-pots beneath, or blunder 
into a boiling pool. After a couple of close calls you regain 
your room more cordially disposed towards guides, and with 
such a fear of hot water in your heart that you imagine you now 
know what h3'drophobia must be like. And at length you begin 



146 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

to fathom the meaning of that cryptic sign which is posted all 
over the rustic architecture of the Inn: 



DO NOT MARK ON LOGS 
OR BARK 



Nearby I fomid a geyser brimming with human interest. It 
was named The Chinaman, after the queued laundryman who 
once happened upon this pool of clear boiling water, pitched his 
tent over it and started in with thanksgiving upon his national 
American vocation. America, he decided, was well named 
the land of the free. Who ever heard of free boiling water for 
a Chinaman? Why, it was as ideal as lying on your back in 
the tropics and allowing dates and bread-fruit to drop into your 
languidly opened mouth. He grinned and cast in the clothes 
and the soap. 

Now soap happens to be the stifFest stimulant that a geyser 
can take. It is so stiff that the teetotalers are said to have 
made Uncle Sam prohibit offering a geyser soap. For it re- 
tards the circulation of hot water in the subterranean tube and 
thus increases the steam pressure and hastens the geyser's peri- 
odical spree. It is on the old principle that where there 's life, 
there 's soap. There was death, as well, in this particular case. 
For the geyser spreed at once, and with an exuberance that is 
said to have made away with soap, clothes, tent and Chinaman. 

In the Spring the geysers act for a while as though they had 
contracted the soap habit. A friend of mine who has been in 
the Park every summer since he was four assured me that in 
the fever of this vernal madness all the geysers (all, that is, but 
Old Faithful) get off their schedules and run amuck. Then 
the old inhabitants always waggle their heads, as sages are w-ont 
to waggle theirs at the vagaries of youth, and say that the 
geysers are no longer to be depended upon. "But," said my 
friend, "soon as the Spring freshets are over I notice they 
steady right down into their regular routine." 



YELLOAVSTONE PARK 14T 

Here the algfe are often especially charming. They flourish 
in the outlets of the sjirings and observe a regular progression 
of colors that range, with the gradual cooling of the waters, 
from dead, filmy whites, to flesh-color and salmon, and then 
through orange and yellow to emerald and a host of browns. 
Thus, in estimating the temperature of these pools and streams, 
an accurate eye for color is almost as good as a thermometer. 
But in parts of the Upper Basin these little plants have, curi- 
ously enough, assumed forms that are often repellently physi- 
ological. They reminded me of the anatomical museums of 
medical colleges where the various parts of the human body, 
neatly pickled and with membranes and sinews exposed, are 
spread out for inspection. Some of the groups of algae looked 
like slabs of decayed bone. There was a cross section of a 
brain, and a lot of clinging muscles. And uj^on the margin of 
the Oyster Shell, fallen grasses had been coated to simulate a 
network of veins and arteries. 

The middle of the Upper Basin is strangely picturesque. 
The cone of Castle Geyser might be a ruined tomb on the 
Roman campagna; and the Castle Well would put to shame 
the fairest pools of Tivoli. Its center is of peacock blue. 
The gray shelf of rim cuts sharply down into this and makes a 
purple shadow ; while the picture is mottled like a INIonet canvas 
by the agitation of the softly boiling surface. These heat 
markings are among the most interesting features of the hot 
pools. Some of the surfaces, instead of being mottled, are cov- 
ered with a fine film of what looks like acid, engraved with in- 
numerable fine lines. And the shadows of these, constantly 
caressing the corals and sponges, the pearls and fungi, the fruits 
and flowers of geyserite at the bottom, lend them a variety and 
vivacity of which one never wearies. 

Beauty Spring was so named because the Indian belles once 
thought the water good for the complexion, and were fond of 
bathing there. jSIusing upon those limpid depths, one is con- 
vinced that if the spring could have passed along to the maidens 



148 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

a tithe of its own loveliness, they would have risen from it as 
fair as Aphrodite. 

Of all the geyser cones, that of The Grotto leads in gro- 
tesquery. The full-face view makes one think of an immense 
blind toad with goggling eye sockets, puffing at a cigar that has 
the traditional Tammany tilt. From another angle, when an 
eruption is imminent, it is like an irregularly whorled sea shell 
with the spume being blown out of it. One moves to the front 
again. Suddenly from behind the cigar the toad spews out a 
mouthful of water, each drop forming a particle of silver 
against the turquoise sky. Then chaos begins. Now, most of 
the other gej'sers possess in eruption a spiritual sort of beauty. 
And Arthur Upson — who once worked here as guide to pay for 
the luxury of being a poet — w^as justified in writing: 

"I watch through the gray-green h_v;iline the geyser-vapors' flight — 
Stray underworldlings made divine by contact with the light, 
Like souls fresh-freed from earth's confine and bound for realms more 
bright." 

But he could never have said this of the Grotto's belchings. 
Those confused, angry waters, mingled with steam, bursting 
with crunch and moan from the maw of this slimy looking 
creature are nothing short of infernal. How different from 
the blitheness of its neighbor, the sunny-spirited Daisy ! 

The names of Rainbow Pool and Sunset Lake are no exag- 
gerations. Anywhere else they would be illustrious. But here, 
they have small chance of fame. For the wonder of Emerald 
Pool is too near them. Its dreamy depths, as one gazes down 
through an essence almost too pure and precious to couple with 
the thought of hydrogen and oxygen,^seem haunts most fit 
for the mermen and the other elusive w-ater-folk that Boecklin 
loved to paint. The cool enticement of its depths is belied 
by the testimony of the fleeces of steam endlessly filming and 
dissolving on the surface. The greens are all strange hues that 
never were on land or sea, — unhuman greens which fairly or}' 



YELLOWSTONE PARK 151 

out for those creatures that swim through the labyrinthine 
depths of Teutonic mythology. If we had onl}^ discovered it 
a few centuries ago, Emerald Pool might have given rise to one 
of those American legends of which we are to-day so sadly 
destitute. But one hopes that on summer eves to come our 
poets shall dream more magic things beside this pool than re- 
main to be dreamed beside any haunted stream that ever be- 
witched the Old World. 

Old Faithful geyser, when all is said, must remain the trav- 
eler's favorite. It is beautiful and faithful and perfect and 
very venerable. It is the first to welcome his arrival. It per- 
forms a miracle every sixty-five minutes of his stay. It is the 
last to speed him onward. And it would have performed the 
same good offices, back there in the small hours of history, for 
that same traveler's inarticulate ancestors, when they were stiU 
swinging from branch to branch, — provided they had had the 
good sense to swing in his direction. 

Every evening a search-light on the Imi roof is trained upon 
one of Old Faithful's performances. One does not forget a 
scene like that. 

We were sitting there, perhaps a hundred pilgrims of us, as 
Old Faithful once more took its famous leap and spread itself 
out on the breeze. The search-light casually regarded the spec- 
tacle, and instantly there came upon the wall of steam and 
spray a circular rainbow surrounded by an aureole of misty 
gold. Then the lens was thrown out of focus, and one could 
distinctly catch the tlirill which ran through the crowd as pur- 
ple, then emerald, then violet overspread the base of that mir- 
acle of cloud soaring up through the fiery rain. One could feel 
the common human heart throb faster as at the climax of some 
supreme symphony or drama — almost as I had felt it throb 
once in JSIanhattan when I beheld young girls jumping by 
scores down through the shroud of flame which wrapped the 
lofty windows of the Triangle Building. There were we, hold- 
ing our breath at the nuptials of the two magicians, light and 



152 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

flying water. Suddenly the barriers between us crumbled 
away. We became simply so many fellow creatures in the 
presence of the divine. And when the great tree of water with- 
ered, we fell to chatting like old friends. 

At the Old Faithful Inn I first enjoyed the Park's famous 
fishing. Throughout my western trip that scaly will-o'-the- 
wisp, the fly- fancying trout, had come no nearer than the waters 
of the migratory land of promise which keeps gliding ahead 
on the horizon of every traveling angler. But here that trout 
awaited my arrival. The day I first carried a rod down the 
Firehole River there came back in the creel a dozen gamy Loch 
Levens weighing all told thirteen pounds. One of them, a two 
pounder, had leaped out of water ten times before folding his 
gallant fins in the net. And this was the beginning of an orgy 
of sport. It was marred only by the hunger of the Firehole 
mosquito. The sting of this beast is endowed — perhaps by the 
fire-water he drinks — with the strength of ten. Desi)ite him, 
though, the Park manages somehow to exist without the hal- 
lowed alleviations of fly-dope. 

At length I tore myself from geyserdom and climbed over 
the Great Divide, that impartial ridge upon whose backbone, 
if a drop of rain fall squarely, one half will flow to New Or- 
leans, the other to Portland or through Arizona's vale of moun- 
tain-temples into the Gulf of California. Then on to where 
were visible the distant sharp peaks of the Tetons, sacred to the 
memory of Owen Wister's Virginian. 

Late that afternoon, afloat on Yellowstone Lake, I thought I 
had never seen another body of inland water combining such 
majesty of sweep with so much strongly individualized beauty. 
Drenched in the alpenglow the snow summits of the Absarokas 
towered above the shore. Over the waters hung a vast, purple 
loving-cup of cloud. Purple draperies hovered over the firs 
that clothed the western side to the very beach and half hid a 
flare of camp-fire. Little Stevenson Island became a thing en- 






VKLI.OWSrUNli l.AKl. 



YELLOWSTONE PARK 155 

chanted. And without warning there sprang up in the four 
quarters of the heavens four different sunset pageants. It was 
as if the sky would not be outdone in generosity by a lake 
which had in store, wherever one turned, a different tale of 
beauty or of grandeur. 

I spent a day x-isiting the white pelicans. Their rookery was 
a score of miles away across the lake. JNIore than two hundred 
pelicans were brooding on their eggs, fairly whitening the small 
island. Here and there stood sentries above the mass of wings, 
reaching up their long necks like lilies, white-stemmed and with 
drooping yellow heads. As we approached there came a fear- 
ful flapping. Singly at first, then in concerted movements, the 
ungainly creatures gave a waddle and an awkward jump into 
the air, and instantly passed from awkwardness to the utmost 
poetry of motion. They took their places in the accurately 
prescribed military formation of pelicandom and began wheel- 
ing above our heads, some of them at an elevation that seemed 
thrice the height of the loftiest visible mountain. Landing we 
cast one glance at the cones of sand, each containing a couple of 
the long, heavy eggs. Then, before they could cool, we left 
hastily in order not to defeat the cause of pelican eugenics. As 
we pulled away the anxious birds swooped from the clouds, 
circled the island several times, and settled majestically down. 
Instantly the touch of earth converted them again to timid, 
grotesque, absurd waddlers. And once more they fluffed 
down into maternal peace below then- lily-sentries, blending 
into one composition with the brilliant waters and the red- 
brown, snow-striped summits of the Rockies. 

Yellowstone Lake adds to its other attractions the fascina- 
tion of an unsolved mystery. Above its waters a strange sound 
is sometimes heard. Somewhat like the murmur of bees or of 
telegraph wires, this sound begins softly in the north, grows 
louder, reaches a climax, then dies away to the south. Sci- 
entists have studied the enigma but have never been able to 
explain it. Perhaps in ancient Germany some such sound 



156 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

specter as this may have given rise to the myth of the Wild 
Hunt. 

The coach ride between the lake and the Grand Canyon of 
the Yellowstone boasts one thing worthy to be called a "sight." 
Its distinction, though, is not beauty but repulsiveness. Mud 
Geyser and its horrible dead waters are perfumed like the 
Standard Oil Company and resemble the witchs' cauldron in 
Macbeth. The very evergreens round about have turned pale 
with dried mud at the sight. 

To cheer us after this experience, our driver spun yarns. In 
some of these we recognized the imaginative quality of old Jim 
Bridger. He told of an icy stream which cascaded so hard 
down a mountain that it was hot from friction by the time it 
reached the bottom. He assured us that the waters of Alum 
Creek, over which we passed, were so strong of alum that if you 
should ford it on horseback, your horse's hoofs would be puck- 
ered up to pin points. But if you took a pailful along and 
sprinkled it on the road you would get there twice as quick; 
because the water was so strong that it could pucker distance 
itself. "See that there striped board?" He pointed to a gov- 
ernment snow gauge. "Well, sir, one day a terrible smart 
young feller asked me what them tilings was fer. And he 
b'lieved me when I told him they was barber poles where the 
grizzlies all congregated Sat'day nights fer to git shaved." 

Finally the coach pulled up beside the last and largest ex- 
hibit in God's old curiosity shop. But I would risk no casual 
glance into that Grand Canyon where, as the Reverend Tal- 
mage once wrote, "hung uj) and let down and spread abroad 
are all the colors of the land, sea and sky." So I got to horse 
and galloped to a position of vantage called Artist Point. 

Artist Point held in store for me one of the surprises of my 
life. The writers and painters and promoters of colored photo- 
graphs had prepared me for the utmost riot of color allowed by 
the liberal laws of Nature, — a pictorial hue-and-cry, an anarchy 



YELLOWSTONE PARK 15T 

of paint. They had led me to look for a gorge rather more 
thickly pasted with shrieking primary hues than Matisse's pal- 
ette, — a sort of brass band transposed into pigment with the 
strident cornets, the narrow-dissecting piccolo, the cymbals, 
trombones and big bass drum all at the full stretch of unbridled 
frenzy. But what w-as my amazement to find instead, a well- 
balanced, mellow orchestra of color, never obstreperous, never 
allowing a blatant tone to emerge into relief. 

A third of a mile away on the opposite wall were broad, tran- 
quil slides of cream and pink, orange and rust color. Down- 
stream they grew more yellow and jagged. Where the pin- 
nacles of Inspiration Point were relieved against far chifs of 
royal purple, the ponderous quietude of the canyon was brought 
out the more by an occasional spot of sharp color. A thousand 
feet below ranted the foam-checkered green of the river. 

Swooping upstream a pair of eagles drew my eyes around to 
a scene cooler in tone but no less stirring. The soft, volcanic 
walls of the gorge were sculptured here more elaborately into a 
legion of towers and tombs, castles and columns and cornices, 
spires, pagodas, galleries, and shadow-sprayed ruins. Nearby 
were pyramids of saffron and sulphur, curious miniatures of 
the temples of the Colorado. 

Here, then, were outspread those walls of yellow stone that 
had given the Park its name. The longer I looked, the wider 
grew the range of the color scheme, the rarer the hues which 
started out of unsuspected nooks; the more translucent the 
moonstone cliff beside the great cataract whose part it was to 
crown the prospect. But despite all this, and despite the 
rhapsodies of the travel books, I never could come to feel that 
in richness of coloring, this Grand Canyon equaled Arizona's. 
It is true that there are a few spots and slides above the Yel- 
lowstone higher in key than anything above the Colorado. 
But, taken all in all, the royalty of the Arizona pageant of 
hues stands to that of the Wyoming pageant, in my opinion, 
as the "divinity tliat doth hedge a king" stands to that which 



158 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

hedges an heir-apparent. And it did not surprise me to be 
told later by the president of the Yellowstone Park Associa- 
tion that the artists and writers have been doing the Park a 
grave injustice by exaggerating its beauty and wonder and 
violence of its hues. Some have gone the length of misrepre- 
senting its rivals. Campbell's Guide Book, for example, 
prints this amazing falsehood: "The grand magnificence of 
color, the superbly beautiful walls with its (dc) points and 
pinnacles exist only in the Yellowstone. The colors of the 
Arizona Canyon are only atmospheric effects; its tcalls are 
of adobe color." (The italics are not Mr. Campbell's.) 

To my mind the special distinction of this Yellowstone gorge 
lies not so much in its color as in the combination of color and 
form with the two splendid waterfalls, one more than a hun- 
dred, the other more than three hundred feet in height. The 
walls above the Colorado are richer, the falls of the Yosemite, 
higher and perhaps fairer. But the Yellowstone combines 
falls and colored walls into an incomparable whole. One gazes 
upstream and beholds the gorge emphasized and finished by 
the Great Falls. AVith all the plumed and garlanded dignity 
of Yosemite's Vernal, this cataract plunges into the cloud 
of irised spray that forever hides the maelstrom, raging as 
though Excelsior, the hugest of earth's geysers, were in full 
eruption. And one knows that here is the authentic climax of 
Wonderland. 

But, as in Arizona, so in Wyoming, one has never really 
seen the Grand Canyon before descending to its lowest depths. 
I clambered upon Red Rock, a cupola which, seen from the 
river against deep blue heavens, is like Yosemite's Sentinel, 
but bathed in his own blood. A fierce black thunder storm 
repaid me by cannonading up the canyon and opening upon 
the opposing artillery of the falls. Once up there, however, 
I seemed to have lost touch with the gentle art of getting down. 
And I thought of something I had overheard at breakfast. 
"This here Canyon is sure some scarj' place," a fat clothing 



YELLOWSTONE PARK 159 

merchant from New York had observed. "I have n't slept 
a wink! All last night I was falling down them cliffs and 
swimming up them falls." I spent many puzzled moments 
clinging over a precipice, trj'ing like a dancing master all the 
varieties of foot technic in my repertory, and experimenting 
with strangle holds like a wrestler. But at last instinct grew 
tired of this play and furnished the proper combination. 

With the assistance of a rope, the trail down the opposite 
cliff proved fairly easy. Waiting at the bottom to greet me 
was a huge rainbow. Starting just under the falls, it stood 
there, unshattered, tremorless under the hammering of those 
thousand ton sledges of water, its outer rosy rim brushing the 
yellow walls and sweeping around, an arc two hundred feet 
in span, to the foot of the maelstrom. From here the buttes 
and spires and the delicate drawing of the crumbling walls 
showed at their best. High on the rim opposite the platforms 
for tourists stood etched against the sky with their intermittent 
clouds of witnesses who occasionally would spy me and flap 
fraternal arms. It was good to see their evident exhilaration. 
And, in the fullness of my o^vn, I embraced the democratic 
hope that these clouds might continue to fill the heavens ever 
thicker and faster. 

Before leaving the Old Curiosity Shop I climbed over in- 
credible carpets of flowers to the ten thousand foot crater of 
a played-out fire-mountain named Washburn. It was stimu- 
lating to feel that, as an American, I owned all these flowering 
uplands, these forests, rivers and mountains, and that they 
constituted no mean country place to which to invite the world 
for a week-end or month-end or year-end. I glowed with 
hospitality. . . . 

But on the icy summit the mercury fell fast and I had to 
warm myself with memories. Over yonder near Bunsen Peak 
I saw, through that best of lenses, the mind's eye, still growing 
and flowing and glowing, those strange, softly luminous ter- 
races where rosy steam forever sifts through rows of icicles. 



160 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

In the south-west columns of steam were still rising above 
the trees, as General Washburn saw them when he stood on 
that very summit, surveying the promised land which he was 
so soon to make known to the world. And in thought I re- 
traversed those pearly sinter plains where heaven-colored pools 
dream on the battle-ground of earth-imprisoned Titans. 
Southward the wide Lake, parent of waters, spread out its 
fingers as if beckoning the nations to come and play. And 
close at hand the earth yawned wide, revealing its wild and 
painted heart of yellow stone. 



VI 
AMONG THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 

THE Carmel," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, 
more than a generation ago, "runs by many pleas- 
ant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wad- 
ing kine; and at last as it is falling toward a 
quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a 
hill. . . . The roof has fallen . . . the holy bell of St. Charles 
is long dismounted . . ." 

Last spring I stood in that California valley, wishing that 
R. L. S. might come back to see how the roof has returned to 
its appointed place, and the holy bell been remounted by rever- 
ent hands. If ever his shade is permitted to wander about "un- 
der the wide and starry sky" and revisit the pale glimpses of the 
moon, I am sure that sometimes it Avalks again among the 
defiant wind-tortured cypresses of the shore near ISIontei'ey, 
through masses of lupine and glittering ice-plant, until the 
facade of Carmelo ^lission comes into view. For the portal 
and star-window and bell-tower of this church seem especially 
made for the delectation of beauty-lovers by moonlight. And 
the outside stairway of worn stones leading toward the egg- 
shaped cupola in yellow and orange, cream and black, set 
about by curious, irregular pinnacles, is the sort of thing one 
expects to find, not in the land of the United Trusts of 
America, but in those somnolent and decaying countries where 
the !Moors once dreamed and wrought. 

There I lingered marveling at the contrast between our 
Atlantic and Pacific pioneers; between the Pilgrim and Cava- 
lier Fathers whose first care was to build blockhouses, and 

161 



162 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

the Franciscan Fathers whose first care was to build houses 
of God. And all at once I caught like some benignant fever 
a sense of the romance of the Spanish missions. 

They were not altogether strange to me. In wandering 
down the coast I had already basked in the mellowness of the 
time-softened decorations at Dolores, — the mission that was 
so miraculously spared in the burning of San Francisco. I 
had also made a pilgrimage to San Juan Bautista and mused 
away an afternoon beside the arcades and balconies of the 
drowsy Spanish plaza, along the blooming patio walks and in 
what earthquakes and restorers and other malignant forces of 
nature had spared of the church. 

These things were all very well, only they had not fired 
my imagination. But when, in the Carmelo chancel, I came 
upon the grave of Junipero Serra, that mighty soul who was 
at once the American St. Francis, the Columbus of civiliza- 
tion on the Pacific slope, the spiritual Washington of the 
West, — and when it dawned on me that this struggle for 
civilization had begun along the Pacific simultaneously with 
that for independence along the Atlantic, I resolved on a closer 
acquaintance with the man and his works. 

It is a strange coincidence, surely, that Carmelo, the oldest 
but one of the California missions, and the headquarters of 
Serra, their president, should have been founded on June 3, 
1770, scarcely three months after the Boston INIassacre. And 
transcontinental coincidences do not stop here. For Serra 
was born in ISIajorca, an island responsible for some of the 
most romantic ruins and events on both of our coasts. From 
JSIajorca in the eighteenth century the notorious Governor 
TurnbuU took many of his white slaves. These he forced to 
build the cochina canals and houses and forts which lie to-day 
in such picturesque ruin under the Florida sky, near the 
broken arches of what some suppose to be the oldest church in 
the land. And some of these white slaves doubtless saw the 
light of JNIajorca in the same year, 1713, that produced Serra, 




INTLRlOil Ul- CAliMLl.O (.-.AN CAliLo.-,) Mi.-..->10N AS SlLVbNSON SAW 11 
Sliuwiiis orii;iiiul spriii;; of roof and curve of « alls 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 165 

the man destined to sow the Pacific Coast with ruins fully as 
picturesque as those of Florida. 

Serra assumed his first name out of admiration for the quaint 
lovable character of the saint who was companion to St. 
Francis. In 1749 Spain sent him as missionary to Mexico. 
Nineteen years later he was placed in charge of the missions of 
Lower California. And the next year, 1769, he set out as 
pioneer into what is to-day the American California, to found 
San Diego and ^lonterey and many another fair and thriv- 
ing conmiunity. There I stood in the Carmelo chancel, by the 
grave of this little brother of Christ and of St. Francis, "el in- 
fatigable operario de la viha del Seiior" as his comrade once 
beautifully called him. I remembered the many leagues this 
"indefatigable laborer in the Lord's vineyard" had dragged him- 
self over the rough California trails on that ulcerated leg of liis 
which never healed; and how in preaching he used to make 
more vivid his descriptions of the sinner's future bj' beating his 
breast violently with a rock and burning it with a torch. There 
came to mind his sportsmanlike end on that very spot. Like 
an old lion-heart he died, clad in his habit and erect on his knees 
mitil almost the last moment, cheering up the mourners and 
presenting as game a front to the universal enemy as any knight 
that ever drew sword. Now I understood why the old Portu- 
guese custodian of this place had paid his tribute to the friars 
thus: "Dem work for civilize; not work for money. Dey 
work to religion." 

All at once the little church seemed fairly alive with Serra 
and his band, — vibrant with the infectious spirit of those daunt- 
less pioneers. And then and there I resolved to make a pil- 
grimage to the chief and most typical missions beginning at 
their historical beginning. So I caught the next through ex- 
press to San Diego, the place which in 1769, with the founding 
of the first mission, became the cradle of California. On the 
way I thought often of the momentous opening scene of the 
mission drama, with the Spanish galleons riding at anchor in 



166 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

the harbor. Most of the party of pioneers lay in tule huts on 
the beach, prostrated with scurvy and molested by thievish In- 
dians; wliile the remnant, in a primitive chapel of reeds and 
branches, sang the Veni Creator Spiritus and celebrated the 
first mass, "supplying the want of an organ by discharging 
firearms," as an old chronicler confesses, having only the 
"smoke of muskets for incense." 

Even if Cahfornia had no Yosemites or Tahoes, no Sierras 
or moldering missions to charm travelers withal — if, indeed, 
it had nothing to show but the people themselves, to travel 
there would still be a delight. For it is a State that allows its 
doctors to languish and its children to spend twelve months of 
the year out of doors; with the result that it is turning out a 
new race of human beings, a beautiful, radiant, large-chested, 
large-limbed race, exuberant and full of the mellow wine of 
life. One cannot think of another place on earth where in the 
course of a day there are to be seen so many smiling faces. 

It seems hardly fair to "spread honey on sugar" by gracing 
such an Eden with the glamour of old Spanish ruins. But I 
found this glamour at my destination, not many miles from the 
modern San Diego. Set beyond a flowering meadow, beyond 
olives and the plumes of Southern cedars, embowered in pepper 
and eucalyptus, the crimibling walls of the mission made a 
sight passing strange to eyes fresh from the Anglo-Saxon-ness 
of New England. There was something affecting about them, 
too. It brought to mind what ]Mr. Charles F. Lummis, that 
sympathetic interpreter of the south-west, had said about San 
Diego a few days before: "If you can only get hold of that 
humble little truck of a mission, you '11 be in a better position 
to gauge what grew out of it. That handful of adobe is the 
only reason why any of us are here to-day." 

True, there was little enough remaining for the eye to get 
hold of. The church facade was now the only part of the origi- 
nal group left intact. And the presers^ation of even this was 




CARMKI.n BF.Kdlll, 111 -IhUAIKiN 

rssaassr 



^^^ 




SAN r.AIiUIKI. 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 169 

due to the Landmarks Club whose reverent care stands as 
sharply contrasted with the carelessness of the rest of us, as 
the poetry of the ruin, with the repulsive ugliness of the school- 
house beside it. 

That ugliness redeemed itself, however, by emitting a de- 
lightful friar who showed me about with the utmost amiability. 
He even pried up the lid of a cistern and pointed out the open- 
ing of a tunnel through wlaich, as history — or legend — relates, 
two of the original community escaped one wild night in 1775 
when a thousand Indians attacked and burned the mission and, 
after inflicting horrid tortures on Father Jayme, made him the 
first martjT of California. Then my guide showed me the 
rude wooden cross over the martyr's grave and in sonorous 
Spanish repeated Serra's exclamation on hearing of his death: 
"Thank God! the soil is now watered. Now will follow the 
conversion of the Diegueiios." These words have the true 
ring. They are characteristic of the missionary spirit the 
world over. 

Set a day's horseback ride apart, the missions of California 
punctuate the whole stretch of the Pacific coast from San 
Diego to San Francisco. And they are connected by El 
Camitio Real, or the King's Highway — the oldest of Cali- 
fornia roads. The next mission on this highway was San Luis 
Rev. I found it in an idyllic valley with hills nearby undu- 
lating as if in imitation of the Coast Range mountains that 
raised ghostly ramparts behind. And a similar imitation was 
to be seen in the architecture of the mission where the cemetery 
gate billowed up over its arcliway, re-echoing the rhythm of 
the church gable. 

San Luis Rey was in charge of the aged Father O'Keefe, 
one of the unfortunately "practical" persons who should never 
be given the power of life or death over beauty and romance. 
Doubtless the Father has worked according to his lights with 
energy and persistence and has accomplished much that is 
praiseworthy. But of late his eff'orts have been misguided. 



170 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

He has done entirely away with two of the three fine old cis- 
terns in the churchyard, and has bricked up the cliarming out- 
side stairway, allowing one of the brothers to paint a hideous 
daub over the place. He has "freshened up" the frescoes with 
which the former Indian neophytes had decorated the church 
pilasters, and which, as Helen Hunt Jackson reported thirty 
years ago, had "faded and blended into a delicious tone." To- 
day these pilasters fairly shriek in agony. Also the good 
Father intends to push ahead along these lines with vigor, hop- 
ing soon to "restore" the altar piece which is almost the only 
old thing left unmolested within the church. 

The exterior, I was thankful to find, had been spared. It 
was hard to decide which was more satisfying, the view which 
Mr. Herter had painted, or that from the other corner where 
the ruins of the old mill, the Spanish gable of the church, 
the glow of the tiles and a clump of that most paintable of 
trees, the eucalyptus, combined as if consciously composed with 
fragmentary lines of ruined arcade which recalled the lines of 
ancient aqueduct on the Roman campagna. 

The graveyard was also unrestored and had more atmos- 
phere than any other part of the mission. Riotous with rose 
and geranium, it was full of crude crosses of wood, like that 
above the martyr of San Diego, perpetuating the music of for- 
gotten Spanish names. A side chapel jutted out among them 
with walls so cracked and riven that one might look from with- 
out upon the inner surface of its vaulting. 

In 1893 when this mission was re-dedicated by the returning 
Franciscans, it must have beezi a dramatic sight to see the 
Indians who had been there under the former regime. A 
friend of mine was present and saw three Indian women, who 
were heaven alone knows how old, but had actually heard mass 
said at the church's original dedication in 1802. They were 
(]uite blind, and came crawling down from the mountains in- 
quiring where the mission was. And when they were told that 
it was close at hand they sat down on the ground and kept smil- 




..'y^-S- -'«•-'.- 



^^r> 



v.-^- -.- 



mH!^ 




SA\ DIKGO 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 173 

ing and kissing their parclinient hands at it. And when any 
one asked them about the old days they would shake their heads 
sadly and murmur, "Bucno ticmpo! Bueno tiempo!" as who 
should say: 

"Out of the day and night 
A joy has taken flight." 

]\Iy friend confessed that as he watched them the tears lan 
down his cheeks. 

Whenever the interminable discussion reopens about the old 
padres' treatment of the natives I like to think of this demon- 
stration of loyalty. Argument here is apt to run to extremes. 
One side asserts that life for the mission Indians was "one 
grand, sweet song," accompanied by beer and skittles. The 
other side holds that the Puritan underworld of fire and brim- 
stone was paradise compared with what the poor neophytes 
had to endure; and points out, quite justly, that Serra himself 
was a functionary of the Spanish Inquisition. 

It is well known that the neophytes were better treated at 
San Luis Rey than elsewhere. And it was something of a 
shock, in looking over the library at Capistrano, to come upon 
the following passage in a volume called "Life in California, 
by an American," published in 1846. This American, in tell- 
ing of his visit to San Luis Rey in 1829 wrote: "Mass is 
offered daily, and the greater portion of the Indians attend; 
but it is not unusual to see numbers of them driven along by 
the alcaldes, and under the whip's lash forced to the very doors 
of the sanctuary. . . . The condition of the Indians is miser- 
able indeed ; and it is not to be wondered at that many attempt 
to escape from the severity of the religious discipline at the 
mission. They are pursued and generally taken; when they 
are flogged, and an iron clog is fastened to their legs, serving 
as additional punishment, and a warning to others." In the 
light of all the conflicting evidence, however, I prefer to weigh 
that of the loving parchment hands of the centenarians as 



174 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

against the indictments of any number of "Americans"; and 
to hope that the lashes and the iron clogs were but rarely used 
to punctuate and underscore the old padres' gospel of good- 
will toward men. 

A visit to the mission chapel, or assistencia of Pala was not 
to be resisted. It lay at the end of a twenty mile road that 
swarmed with quail, road-runners and cotton-tails. The 
chauffeur pointed out the spot where, a few days before, he 
had run over a wildcat and had not bothered to pick it up as 
wildcats were so common. The purpose of the visit was chiefly 
to enjoy the famous little detached bell-tower, unique of its 
kind; to decipher the quaint jumble of Latin and Spanish on 
the bells that swung on the original thongs of rawhide from 
worm-eaten cross-beams; and to savor the indefinable charm 
of the chapel's interior with the great worn tiles on the floor, 
the walls of adobe and the fascinating wooden statues. 

The population of Pala is almost entirely Indian. Under 
the pretext of basket-buying I went from house to house and 
talked with the large, patient, soft-voiced women as they sat 
over their weaving. Often I was put to it to sujiport my end 
of a conversation on recent magazines and current events. 
And their courtesy and tact, their mental agility and gentle 
breeding made me realize all too vividly with what contrasting 
manners we so-called Americans have been accustomed to these 
real ones. 

"The little hamlet of San Juan Capistrano lies in harbor, 
as it were, looking out on its glimpse of sea, between two low 
spurs of broken and rolling hills, which in June are covered 
with sliining yellow and blue and green, iridescent as a pea- 
cock's neck. It is worth going across the continent to come 
into the village at sunset of a June day. The peace, silence 
and beauty of the spot are brooded over and dominated by the 
grand gray ruin, lifting the whole scene into an ineffable har- 
mony." 

This description was written by the author of "Ramona" in 




m. 








i^B 



SAX Ll'IS KKY 




>.\N .11 \N ( \ri>iii.\M) 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 177, 

the early eighties. And it still holds true. The years have 
brought the drowsy Spanish-feeling hamlet little in the way 
of change except a railway station well done in mission style, 
and some loving and judicious restoration of the good gray 
ruin by men far removed from the type of Father O'Keefe. 

San Juan Capistrano was founded in 1776, just after Lord 
Howe had defeated Washington at "White Plains, Its church, 
a splendid stone affair with seven domes, was, until shaken 
down by the earthquake of 1812, the foremost building of its 
kind in this country. Since then it has remained our most 
poetic ruin. 

In the glare of noon it is slightly austere, but softens into 
glamour as the shadows lengthen over the transept. It never 
loses an engaging dignity which reminds one of that other 
wrecked Spanish church at New Smyrna in Florida, lonely 
under just such smiling skies, surrounded by a similar luxu- 
riance of tree and bloom, and no further from the Atlantic's 
waves than this from the long rollers of the Pacific. When 
the eyes turn a little to the west, though, and discover the 
quartet of venerable bells under the arches of their campanario, 
with the cross-crowned lunette of chapel wall and a glimpse 
beyond, in an angle of softly shadowed cloister, of the pepper- 
tree of Capistrano — there comes a sense of poetic wonder such 
as the marshes of Florida never bred. Sometimes this sense 
comes upon one even more compellingly witliin the hundred- 
yard square of the patio, bordered with ruined arches. Be- 
yond an arcade, all ivy and rose vines and languid peach-trees 
abloom, rises the maih mass of buildings with the red and green 
tiles of the friars' quarters surmounted by the most beautiful 
chimney I know — a creation of sharp-peaked, yellow-lichened 
roof, and latticed sides. 

Sitting there one dreams of Sundays long gone when the 
whole courtyard and its stretches of overlooking tile were filled 
with friars, with neophytes in their blankets, ^\^th dignitaries of 
state and smart army officers and the brilliant robes and man- 



178 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

tillas of Mexican ladies — all applauding the bull-fighters or 
the caballeros who tilted at rings, or the contestants in the na- 
tional sport called carrera del gallo. In this the body of a 
live cock with head and neck well greased was buried in the 
ground. The object was to lean from the saddle and pull it 
out while tearing by at full gallop. 

Others to-day "make merry in their room." The patio is 
often filled with charming ^Mexican and Indian children (de- 
scendants possibly of those old Sabbath-breakers), nimble crea- 
tures with big, brilliant eyes, bronze skins and wondrously 
glossy hair. There they resort every spare hour to swarm 
about their beloved Father O'Sulhvan and play hide-and-go- 
seek in a place unsurpassed for rehearsing that juvenile edi- 
tion of the future i)lay of life and love. 

What mellow-souled enthusiasts the followers of Serra must 
have been to have created here so swiftly and under such trying 
conditions the softly gleaming cloisters, the noble contours of 
dome and arch, pilaster and portal, the frescoes, the con- 
summate grouping of all the parts of this whole; and to have 
left us, even in such a generally despised object as a kitchen 
chimney the admonition that "beauty is truth, truth beauty." 

And now, whenever I hear the sonorous name of Capistrano 
there comes to mind, bej'ond the shadows of an earthquake- 
shattered church, a line of arches with bells a-gleam in them 
like so many great, drooping lilies, then a stretch of white wall 
under a cross-crowned lunette, the deep black end of an arcade, 
the pepper-tree beyond, drenched in the silver of the moon, 
and, through the leaves, fragments of starlit cloister, all 
mingled with the fragrance of flowers in the languorous south- 
ern Tiiglit. 

xVlso I cherish very human memories of the place. It would 
be hard indeed to forget old Jose, the Indian bell-ringer, who 
drew such music from the bronze lilies of the campanario. He 
was a doubly picturesque person in holding — like the well- 
known character in "Ramona" — the position of captain of 




.N \\ KKKNAMK) 










(llildlNAL Cll.\ri;l„ SAX JL'AN ( AIISIKANO 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 181 

the sheepshearers of the country-side. Father O'Sullivan in- 
troduced me to him one afternoon. And, the bell-ringer's soul 
having been warmed with a little good cheer and a long cigar, 
streams of Spanish reminiscence began to flow from his lips. 

He related how his own grandmother had helped to carry 
stones from the distant mountain to build the mission, and how 
the largest ones were dragged down by bulls with the yokes 
fastened to their horns, while even the children would carry 
stones graded in size according to their several abilities. 
He said that his father had been cantor of the large Indian 
choir that used to sing mass out of fine big Gregorian chant- 
books. But these books, unfortunately, were no more. At 
his father's funeral his grandmother had followed the ancient 
Indian custom of burning everything in the possession of the 
dead. This custom was doubtless founded on the excellent 
principle that he who dies rich dies disgraced. But unfor- 
tunately for the mission's priceless volumes, it drew no distinc- 
tion between possession and ownership. 

Jose rhapsodized about the choir singing of those days, ac- 
companied as it was by drum, violin and flute. In a voice 
strangely thin and sweet for his burly frame he sang an ancient 
Kyrie Eleison and a song to the Blessed Virgin which his father 
had taught him. Then he began to boast about his art. "I 
alone know how to ring the mission bells. Whether it is a man 
or a woman or a young child that dies, or for any other oc- 
casion, I alone understand the perfect art of ringing." 

He expanded still more, "Ah, I am a good man, a very 
good man! I have a clean heart. If I wake up in the night 
and hear a cock crow I always saj'^ quickly a prayer to St. 
Peter because the Lord told him before the cock crows twice 
he will deny me thrice. Therefore I pray that I shall deny 
Him not." 

Then he turned suddenly upon me and inquired whether I 
too were a good man. But to save me from answering this 
highly embarrassing question the kind padre interposed, ask- 



182 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

ing Jose with just a hint of sternness why, if lie were such a 
paragon, he had not been seen at mass that morning. 

Jose was swift to turn the subject. "This morning? Ah, 
yes, this morning I was sitting out alone on the loma with my 
sheep, thinking how I am now an old man and have n't got 
together any money yet and how my life has been wasted, 
when, padre, my dog made a sudden leap and just missed by 
an inch a rattlesnake that was going to strike me. He scared 
it away. And I prayed to God in thanks for deliverance and 
thought how if that snake had bit me in a vein I would be lying 
there stiff and cold on the loma." So ran his talk, on and on. 
And I departed glad to have had a look into the mind of one 
so rarely harmonious with his setting. For to-day the genuine 
mission Indian is almost extinct. 

Next came INIission San Gabriel, dear to the hearts of count- 
less tourists. There exists a class of persons who are incapable 
of enjoying anything that a number of other people happen to 
be enjoying at the same time. Such were the group of Eng- 
lish critics who doted upon Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat" until it 
became common property; then cast it forth into outer dark- 
ness. I am not one of these exquisite persons. Of course, 
one cannot batten upon the delights of solitude at San Gabriel. 
But if its teeming sightseers preclude one kind of pleasure, 
they bring another instead. And I found myself admiring the 
original five-feet-around mission grapevine none the less be- 
cause it and its juice were being enjoyed both externally and in- 
ternally by a hundred trolley trippers. Indeed, why should 
any one write about romantic -fVmerica who objects to having 
people enjoy it? 

As I approached the mission across the gardens to the south, 
the heavily buttressed church showed an interesting line of 
pinnacles, backed by eucalyptus trees over which Daubigny 
would have gone daft. In the doorway of a INIexican laborer's 
shanty, fitly outlined against the cross of the fine bell-tower, 
there appeared a beautiful, living ]\Iadonna and Child, and 




l^ III „ .__. ,, 






TIIK ClAKDKN. SANTA HAKHAKA 



1 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 185 

behind an orange grove on the left soared a range of snow- 
capped mountains. 

To my mind the two most satisfying features of San Gabriel 
were a bell-tower yielding in picturesqueness only to that at 
Pala, and a stone stairway outside the church, which may the 
blessed Gabriel long preserve from the fate of the one at San 
Luis Key ! My last memory of the place is of a German artist 
painting the corner of the patio by the old kitchen, with the 
sunlight spattering down through the fig and orange trees 
and hopelessly entangled in an American counterpart of Ger- 
many's "Thousand Year Rosebush." 

San Fernando once boasted a mile of buildings. To-day it 
is reduced to a ruinous church, one long, arcaded cloister, and 
a few heaps of adobe, set in a wide and rather desolate plain. 
With its corbeled beams sagging overhead, its good pilasters 
that are melting swiftly away, and the line of mountains that 
look in through the broken choir, the stern simplicity of the 
church is unaccountably interesting 

I was shown through the cloister b)^ the beautiful Consuela, 
aged eight, and her ^lexican grandmother. Very fittingly, 
they spoke nothing but Spanish. As I prowled, lantern in 
hand, through the mysterious dark passages and chambers, ad- 
miring the hugeness of the kitchen hearth and the thong-tied 
rafters, my companions fitted perfectly into the scene. And 
I wished that the witchlike old woman might tap me with her 
crutch and change me into a Grimm so that I might make of 
the pair and their setting an immortal fairy tale. In the last 
room they exhibited with pride the family altar, a pathetic 
little affair made of a dry-goods box and adorned with tissue 
jjaper of various colors, cheap gilt lanterns, ten vases of flow- 
ers, a lithograph of St. Anthony and a page torn from the 
ubiquitous Saturday Evening Post. Before this collection the 
old woman and the child prostrated themselves with touching 
reverence, upon the same tiles that had been worn by the knees 
of the old Franciscans. Sometimes, they said, as many as 



186 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

four souls attended mass there. To this had the pride of San 
Fernando fallen! 

The best thing about INIission San Buenaventura was the 
view from among the bells of the old tower, out over the um- 
brella trees of the town to the islands of Santa Cruz and Santa 
Rosa whose lofty profiles suggested that of ^It. Desert in the 
far Atlantic. I spent a pleasant hour in the patio sitting un- 
der an orange tree near the (juaint side-portal of the church 
and musing on the history and the beauty that were created 
here before the tawdiy hustle of "civilization" choked to death 
this fair fragment of uncivilized days, girdling it with a mush- 
room gro\\i:h of stores, and planting a trolley line and a miser- 
able street lamp at its very portal. By contrast, however, I 
found that the crude up-to-dateness of Ventura (even the 
name had been brought up-to-date!) was no bad preparation 
for the mellow glories of Santa Barbara. 

Santa Barbara is a place of balm which equals a judicious 
blend of Capri, Florida, Seville, Switzerland, Samoa, and the 
Isles of the Blest, situate beyond Ultima Thule. One wanders 
through a purple mist of bougainvillea, enveloped in the fra- 
grance of lemon blooms, down avenues of palmetto and gum. 
Then one reaches an old mission that is invested with a charm 
as complete as that of the atmosphere. 

My first view of its twin bell-towers was almost the best. 
It came over a hedge starred with Passion blooms in Padre 
Street. There were the towers beyond the corner of a rose- 
corniced bungalow, framed by foliage of bamboo and eucalyp- 
tus, set in a canyon's mouth against a sheer mountain wall that 
was broadly painted with shadow and streaked with scarves 
of filmy cloud. It was a fit setting for the one California mis- 
sion which has never passed out of Franciscan control, the one 
most redolent to-day of the romance of Catholicism. 

I never could think of Santa Barbara in terms of the United 
States. On the flower-carpeted uplands above the mission, 
with their panoramas of valley, peak and far shining ocean. 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 187 

their endless variety of bird and bloom, their shadow pictures 
and broad-eaved, balconied houses nestling on the slope hke so 
many chalets, the same blitheness always possessed me that 
Switzerland's glacier-bomid blossom-carpets have never failed 
to bring. 

The mission patio, from which, according to the unfailing 
rule of cloisters, all women except queens and presidents' wives 
are excluded, was just the spot for day-dreams. ]My first 
morning there was a typical one. From the choir of the church 
floated the virile sound of men's singing. The padres were 
chanting the Sixth and None Office for St. George while be- 
lated brothers were running across the court, a little ungainly 
in their robes, and with sandaled bare feet flashing underneath. 
Others, fingering holj' books, were pacing the walks. And a 
few of them looked pitifully young and fresh and glowing to 
be thus consecrated to the chill routine of monasteries. But if 
anywhere such a life could seem less than chill, it was here in 
this irised close, full of palms, roses, lilies and a hundred other 
exuberant plants set among the arms of rare cacti, with j^il- 
lars and tiles framing them round, and above, the gable of the 
church flanked by the two noble towers. After the office of 
the day was done, though, and a brown-robed, tonsured figure 
had rung the great bell thrice seven times, it was a moving 
sight to see the procession pass to the refectory. First came 
the rigid, tottering elder brothers, then the sad, stern, middle- 
aged ones, and then the blooming boys, all with heads bent and 
features set as if in the grip of some overwhelming preoccupa- 
tion. They looked like the stuff that pioneer heroes and mar- 
tyrs are made of. 

Perhaps one never realizes the full poetry of Santa Bar- 
bara until he has knelt, some misty evening, on the steps of 
the softly plashing mission fountain, and looked out under the 
sprays of the peppers, and seen how soft and spiritual the 
church facade becomes in the veiled light of the arcs that are 
like so many little moons shining from the one inevitable source. 



188 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

On such a night one grows aware of the wonder of the broad 
shadows thrown by those pilasters that go ahnost to nothing 
in the common hght of day, but are transformed now with as 
poignant a sorcery as ever gleamed from the front of a Notre 
Dame or an Amiens. One feels how mystically the towers lose 
themselves in the night. And then glancing a little do\\Tiward, 
he finds the whole wonder given back — but more faintly, like 
the dream of a dream — in the softly rippling basin of the foun- 
tain. 

Here my pilgrimage ceased. I had seen the most typical 
of the twenty-one missions of California — ^those radiating cen- 
ters of Christianity and culture which Spain set down in such 
a genial spirit along the whole six hundred miles of El Camino 
Real to welcome the traveler with free and overflowing Spanish 
hospitality and to modernize the ancient Americans, putting 
the fear of God — and of the lash — into their dusky hearts. 

Perhaps The King's Highway would more truly be called 
to-day El Camino Unreal, so fictitious do the old missions now 
appear in this brand-new country of ours. They are too good 
to be true of these twentieth century States. America does 
all things quickly, even to the making of antiques. But it 
seems unbelievable that in less than five generations she could 
have produced such an impressive series of ruins, so venerable 
so "beauteous in decay." Strange figm-es out of an incredible 
past, they stand "like Ruth amid the alien corn," pathetic alike 
in restoration and ruin, the delight of a land for which their 
very aloofness distils an irresistible magic. 

Down the reaches of the century that is no more steal the 
dim shadows of neophyte and friar, tending the olive and the 
vine or bowing at mass in the twilit chapel. Shades of jerk- 
ined guard and dashing caballcro appear, the flirt of mantilla 
and fan, the charge and trample of infuriated bulls in the gay 
Sabbath patio. 

Down the years, too, float strange sounds: the rattle of a 
galleon's cordage, the Spanish chantey of the crew as they 



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.^?,mf^s^. 






SAN ULKN.W KNll 1{A 








fifwif 











PLi.rn 



CONH-.SSIONAt. 



THE OLD CALIFORNIA MISSIONS 191 

heave anchor for the Sunset Sea, the warwhoops of Indians, 
the crackle of flame about the besieged padres. Above all 
rings out the music of mission bells swung from a tree on a soli- 
tary shore, and the sweet, impassioned voice of the little brother 
of St. Francis, crying in the wilderness. 



VII 
THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 

AFTER his somewhat arduous pursuit of these vanish- 
ing, romantic rehcs of Cahfornia's early civilization, 
the pilgrim would do well to recuperate amid a dif- 
ferent kind of romance — one that is the same yester- 
day, to-day and forever. 

The romance of the Yosemite hursts upon you memorably, 
overpoweringly — that is, if you approach it right. INIost people 
nowadays approach it wrong : via El Portal, because that route 
is cheaper and easier. These unfortunates are gradually in- 
sinuated into the Valley by a road cunningly calculated to lose 
them forever that "first, fine, careless rapture" which every one 
ought to taste who looks with fresh eyes upon the beauty and 
grandeur of the Yosemite. 

They are a little disappointed, and remain so for days, be- 
cause they do not find the actual place quite squaring with the 
rhapsodical style of those volumes on California which cram 
the fore-part of every bookshop in the State. And their dis- 
appointment does not vanish until they venture on some of the 
longer climbs. 

How different your case if you abandon steam at Raymond, 
and drive seventy miles, breaking the journey at Wawona! 
There j'ou pay a reverential visit to those trees that are the old- 
est living things on earth — sequoias whose boles were already 
gigantic when Saint Francis was preaching to his brothers the 
birds; when Nero was fiddling fire-music for a pageant like 
that which, in our own day, was to light up the waters of the 
Golden Gate; when young David was choosing pebbles out of 
the brook for his sling; when Socrates was quietly drinking the 
hemlock. 

192 




^OSK.MIl K WAI.I 



I 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 195 

Exalted by association wth these contemporaries of silence 
and old Time, you mount again and ride for hours through a 
goodly but rather monotonous land. This ride is destined to 
have on you somewhat the same effect that the quart of dry oat- 
meal has on the epicure who despatches it to heighten the effect 
of some crawning delicacy. Without warning the coach rolls 
out upon the brink of Inspiration Point. One amazed look, 
and the Yosemite has happened to you. There it lies, a swath 
of English park-land drenched in velvety purple haze, improb- 
ably set between vast, ahnost vertical cliffs that mount, with 
scarcely perceptible talus, as sheerly out of the lap of earth as 
the Wawona redwoods themselves. 

From this first place of vantage — or better still from Artist's 
Point, a little lower down, you enjoy the best possible intro- 
duction to the Valley. At your feet is a greensward flecked 
with reaches of river and bits of frothing rapid, and studded 
with the huge, characteristic live-oaks and evergreens that have 
here attained the supreme perfection of their species. The por- 
tal of the Valley proper, half a league onward, is heralded by 
displays of falling water on either hand. High on the left 
Ribbon Falls floats down two thousand feet to fade into a 
mist phantom, while the more voluminous Bridal Veil opposite 
spins its "slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn," — a fabric that 
is found on nearer approach to be overlaid with a lace of irised 
spray. 

Behind these veils the Cathedral Rocks confront, across a 
half-mile of valley, the predominant feature of the whole pros- 
pect — El Capitan, sheerest, squarest, noblest of tlie crags of 
earth — type of the majesty and strength of the hills. These 
opposing masses form the lower portal of the seven miles of 
Valley proper. In the middle distance the strangely formed 
Half Dome, confronting the North Dome, echoes this gateway 
effect, and forms the upper entrance, incidentally framing the 
snow-smothered mountain called Cloud's Rest. 

WTien first I drove out upon that brink a thunder shower 



190 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

had just taken flight, leaving behind it an afternoon of after- 
noons. Clouds full of shadow steered through a turquoise 
heaven. Over the flanks of Cloud's Rest patches of radiance 
wandered. All the nearer cliffs were in mourning. Sud- 
denly the sunlight blared out full over the horizon, leaped 
upon the mysterious face of Half Dome, and swooped down 
the Valley as the hordes of joyous barbarians once swooped 
down from their Teutonic forests ujion the mistress of the 
world. Best of all, a broad arc of rainbow sprang from El 
Capitan and bent over until it rested akiaost on the Cathedral 
Spires. 

Such, then, was our welcome to the Yosemite. And more 
than one of us stolid Anglo-Saxons looked abruptly away and 
dabbed at a furtive eye. It occurred to me that if any single 
scene could in itself sum up all the chief beauties and marvels 
of our American West, this was the scene. Here was poeti- 
cally ejiitomized and digested within the compass of a picture- 
frame much of the cliff-grandeur of the Arizona Canyon, 
the fascination of Yellowstone Avaterfalls, the call of Colo- 
rado's "silent peaks of aged snow," the charm of the huge park- 
like forests of the Pacific shore. It was the West at a glance. 

After the first shock of surprise and pleasure, one falls to 
wondering at the origin of this freak of nature, this U shaped 
valley with walls so vertical and bottom so floor-like. ]Mr. J. 
Smeaton Chase, the most brilliant of recent writers on the Yo- 
semite, remarks that one might imagine it to have been "the 
work of some exasjierated Titan who, standing with feet 
planted fifty miles apart lengthwise of the Sierra Nevada sum- 
mit and facing westward, raised his hands palm to palm over 
his head, and struck upon the earth with such fury as to cleave 
a gap nearly a mile in depth; then separating his hands he 
thrust back the sides of the fracture, leaving between them a 
narrow, precipice-walled plain." 

The question of how the Valley was actually born has, since 
its discovery by white men in 1851, caused a portentous pother 




IHE HALK 1)UMK 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 199 

among geologists and would-be geologists. Some insisted 
that these walls were riven asunder by what they were fond of 
calling "a convulsion of nature"; some, that once upon a time 
the floor suddenly sank to its present depth along neat lines of 
"fault." But science now has very generally agreed upon a 
less melodramatic theory, namely, that the Valley was scooped 
and kicked out by the toes of a vast glacier whose head ranged 
a mile above the bald pate of Half Dome. 

One of the first things that the visitor notices is that the local 
color-scheme is curiously low in tone. The brilliance of the 
smiht crags is the brilliance of cold, not warm colors. And the 
Yosemite needs the sun more than most of romantic America. 
Its dark days are apt to be rather funereal affairs. But a 
burst of sunlight can change the gorge in a trice from a bleak, 
grim space between bleaker, grimmer crags to a fairj^ garden 
girt with enchanted castles. 

When El Capitan is first aj)proached he seems like a pale, 
resolute old warrior. But on closer acquaintance be becomes 
more mellowly majestic, less the man of battle, more the brood- 
ing divinity. His vertical yellow face, set against a light blue 
sky gives one the same mysterious feeling — onl)- magnified— 
that is born of the soaring of Gothic shafts in Rheims or 
Chartres cathedrals. Seen from below, between tall Incense 
Cedars there is something about the slight rounding of El Capi- 
tan's upper edge that reminds one of the beak of a great bald 
eagle. Sometimes his j)ure, severe jjrofile imi^arts much the 
same sort of thrill that one experiences at the sight of a strong 
man's tense, sinewy, uncovered body. Lie on yoin' back on a 
needle-carpet at the edge of the talus directlj^ beneath him and 
look up through the pine tufts at the face of the cliff that seems 
almost to shelve out over you. The lower part appears to be of 
a pecuUar clayey texture with sharp fissures and scratches as 
though the eternal sculptor had now smoothed it with his 
thumb, now scored it with a ten-league modeling stick. The 
upper portion with its vast flutings is like a section of some 



200 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Doric column, destined perhaps for one of the porches of Wal- 
balla and suddenly abandoned. 

Tlae Cathedral Rocks, kno^vn more familiarly as The Three 
Graces, resemble their relatives diagonally opposite, The Tlu'ee 
Brothers. These are arranged exactly in accordance with Du 
JNIaurier's idea of the respective heights of Taffy, the Laird 
and Little Billee. From the brow of the lowest Grace, Bridal 
Veil Creek shoots to drop six hundred and thirty feet to earth. 
The middle Grace bears upon her sides flakes of yellow, green, 
red and rusty orange that grow more luminous as one gazes, 
and set the highest note of color in the landscape until autumn 
mixes up the brightening foliage on her palette. This Grace, 
moreover, has broken away from ancient iirecedent; for she 
bears papoose-like on her back the third Grace, who peers for- 
ever into the abyss with a rather fatuous, infantile curiosity. 

One should pause to remark the ambitious way in which a 
belt of pines is trying to scale these rocks on the west; and to 
notice on the other hand the twin Cathedral Spires which are 
said to have so fired the imagination of a San Francisco archi- 
tect that he is almost prejiared to sell his soul for a chance to 
imitate them. 

To my mind, Sentinel Rock as seen from here is even more 
romantic and more authentically Gothic than the Spires. Mr. 
Chase, however, finds in this rock suggestions of things far 
older than the Gothic age. He declares that when the sun 
prepares to vanish behind El Capitan, the Sentinel's face "glit- 
ters with fine Plutonian lines, hard and grim as steel on iron 
. . . And when I have lain awake at night with that tall, gray 
specter impending over me and obscuring a tenth of the host 
of heaven, I have been an Egyptian in Tliebes, an Assyrian in 
Xineveh, a IMartian or Saturnian for all I knew, mider the 
spell of his solemn enchantment." 

During the spring floods your ear, long before reaching this 
rock, catches the intermittent boom of distant artillery. This 
??rows louder and is presently mingled with the hissing, roaring. 



II 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 201 

rustling, sifting, groaning and crashing of the loftiest of all 
large bodies of falling water. From time to time, moreover, 
the irreverent ear is reminded of elevated railways or of the 
burblings of some divine Japanese dragon, afflicted with what 
our ainiond-eyed friends would call "the honorable catarrh." 

Then your eye is smitten by the marvel of Yosemite Falls. 
You stand entranced while a river rushes out of the blue in 
great spurts like the throbbing of the heart of the earth. You 
see it fall half a mile in a rock-shaking torrent into a land of 
soft beauty that differs from the snowy regions of the Valley's 
rim as Italy differs from Norway. 

One never wearies of watching the comets or rockets of water 
wliitened by the friction of the air. They are continually form- 
ing, shooting downward and either exploding or fading into 
mist-wraiths before the end of the first clear plunge of twenty- 
six hundred feet. These rockets descend much faster than the 
main masses; and when the air is filled with them, one might 
almost imagine oneself witnessing the collapse of some roof-ful 
of gypsum flowers and alabaster stalactites in one of the 
'cities" of IVIammoth Cave. 

On certain heavy days this fall is peculiarly effective, as 
when a broad white wreath of cloud festoons itself along the top 
of the crag, and the torrent, alike in hue, gushes out of it like a 
vast beard gushing down from a huge mustache. Or, to vary 
the figure, one might fancy that some cyclopean distillery were 
busy condensing that cloud and pouring the product immedi- 
ately into the vat of the Valley. It is as though nature were 
giving so simple a laboratory demonstration of her methods 
that every child might grasp the workings of her divine chem- 
istry. 

The salvos of liquid artiller}% already mentioned, which are 
audible night and day in every part of the Vallej', are caused 
by the wind. This sways the column of water away from the 
wall, mixes it with air, then lets it swing back and explode on 
two projecting ledges. Indeed, the wind has all sorts of frolic 



202 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

fun with these falls. Sometimes it sets them swaying sideways 
like a pendulum worthy to tick in the hall clock of old Father 
Time himself. And on the sort of afternoon when all four 
winds play hookey and sally forth to paint Yosemite an aerial 
red, these oscillations have been seen to describe a full semi- 
circle. 

Occasionally the quartet will join forces, shove their shoul- 
ders under the leaping waters and hold them for minutes at a 
time suspended in mid-air ; and even push them back to the lip, 
where they can be seen from below uncannily jiiling up in their 
imjiotent wrath. Suddenly the four roguish shoulders are 
jerked awaj' and then Yosemite descends to fill the Vallej' 
with a mile of spray preluded bj' a jarring report suggesting 
that the Sentinel opposite, having been shot on duty, has fallen 
crashing to earth. 

These are goodly sights. But Clarence King's splendid 
geological imagination, stimulated by his discovery of ice-strias 
on the rim above, has evolved for us the vision of an earlier day 
when that whole crag must have offered a sight far more won- 
drous, though there was no living eye to behold the glacier of 
Mount Hoffmann pouring over into the valle)\ "How im- 
measurably grander must it have been," he writes, "when the 
great, li\ang, moving glacier, with slow, invisible motion, 
crowded its huge body over the brink, and launched blue ice- 
blocks down through the foam of the cataract into that gulf of 
wild rocks and eddj^ng mist!" 

Camp Curry nestles up the Valley under the polished flanks 
of Glacier Point. It is known, even on its letter-paper as the 
place 

'^^Tiere the fire falls 

And the Stentor calls, — • 

"Stentor" being the nick-name of the proprietor himself, who 
can surely make his stentorian voice carry as far as his deep- 
chested old Greek god-father ever could. Every evening, ac- 
cording to established rite, those friends of the Camp who 




r fit ■■ * 



niK liVliNlNCi UONHKli A 1 CAMl' CI KKV 



iii 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 205 

happen to be spending the niglit up above on Glacier Point 
build a bonfire on the brink. Then the Stentor sends his sonor- 
ous call a mile straight up and the fire is pushed over into sj^ace. 
Deliberately the brands seem to drift down the dark abyss, 
making a track of reddish gold along the vallej^ wall, then 
bursting into myriad sparks for the benefit of the rapt circle 
under the pines beneath. And after a number of repetitions 
one comes to consider the Stentor's vocal organ as impressive a 
natural phenomenon as the crag above and one that harmonizes 
quite as well with its environment. 

Nearby from a certain point on the banks of the ]Merced one 
has the best view of the upper Valley. Washington's Column 
and the North Dome guard the right bank, Tissiack or Half 
Dome, the left, disclosing between them the virginal Alpine 
reaches of the Cloud's Rest country. Occasionally by starlight 
the North Dome is reminiscent of the Roman church of St. 
Peter; and Washington's Column, of the Castle of San Angelo. 
And they are connected by a ridge whose profile somehow 
brings the mind back to that secret wall-passage through which 
the terrified popes used to flee to their stronghold in times of 
democratic unrest. 

Speaking of Tissiack in his "Yosemite Guide Book," Whit- 
ney called it "a new revelation of mountain grandeur." "Was 
there ever," WTote Professor Le Conte, "so venerable, majestic 
and eloquent a minister of natural rehgion as the grand, old 
Half Dome?" No. I do not think there ever was! And, in 
common with other ministers, this one is at his most impressive 
when he is telling you somewhat less than all he knows; when 
for example he resembles the writer who gives you more be- 
tween, than in, his lines. Just as the North Dome, opposite, is 
never so captivating as when turned into a half dome — so Half 
Dome is at his most eloquent when turned into a quarter dome 
by the shrouding elements. I have never seen him more of a 
poem than one day after snow, with his summit partly veiled in 
dun clouds of cotton-wool, broken here and there to suggest an 



206 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

aureole of new-fallen snow-cap. Clouds hung raggedly before 
Ills vertical face as in a theater before some romantic ])ack- 
ground. A torn fragment of blue sky showed here and there 
above, and a lusty cohort of Christmas trees climbed roguishlj' 
up the ledge underneath. 

Like all good mimsters, too, Half Dome at times unbends his 
dignity. And from a certain part of Illilouette Ridge he looks 
like an excited amateur jihotographer, all hunched up under his 
cloth and focusing hard for a last jiicture of the lovely Hetch- 
Hetchy before it is turned by the San Franciscans into a sani- 
tary watering trough. 

In the late afternoon the face of Half Dome becomes a 
gigantic heliograph. For the sun, long after it has sunk from 
the view of the Valley, still vicariously dominates the place by 
flashing and shimmering and glowing its long-distance mes- 
sages upon that golden shield; and, while filling the whole 
upper end of Yosemite with the spirit of sunset, it seems to be 
advising the inhabitants what kind of dawTi is in preparation 
for the snow peak of Fujiyama, 

From the riverside near Camp Curry there is also a clear 
view of those natural freaks known as the Royal Arches, which 
show how the domes of the region were built up in concentric 
layers of stone. Various writers have been so irreverent as to 
liken this architecture to that of an onion ; but I prefer to think 
of a set of those ingenious Chinese balls that fit one within an- 
other, world without end, and always have room for one more. 
According to the Indian legend these domes came into being 
one day when a squaw named Tissiack and her husband en- 
tered the Valley foot-sore and famished. She was bent almost 
double under the weight of her huge, conical basket, but hast- 
ened forward to INIirror Lake and, using the basket as a dijjper, 
drank the lake dry before her husband could come up. When 
he beat her for this she swung around in anger and hurled her 
basket at him. In these attitudes they were turned into stone 
for their wickedness. In his "Tribes of California," Powers 




Koor Ob" vosLi.Mirii kall 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 209 

explains that "Half Dome is the woman and North Dome is 
her husband, while beside the latter is a lower dome which repre- 
sents the basket . . . The acme of female beauty is reached in 
the fashion of cutting off the hair straight across the top of the 
forehead and allowing the side-locks to droop beside the ears; 
and the Indians fancy they discover this square-cut appearance 
on the face of the Half Dome." 

A favorite plan for the un-athletic Yosemite tourist is to 
start out when the sun is riding well up in the heavens, with the 
apparently absurd intention of seeing several sunrises in Mirror 
Lake. The valley is so deeply inlaid in mountains that 
when at last the sun does put in an appearance above the 
shoulder of Tissiack it seems almost overhead. And the simple 
expedient of moving along the shore a few paces at a time in 
order to procure new dawns and ever new in the polished sur- 
face, brings home to one afresh how entirely most of the im- 
portant and impressive things of life depend for their effect on 
one's point of view. Owing to their habits of late rising these 
so-called sunrises are never very florid affairs. But their vari- 
ous delicate colors show to better advantage in the lake than 
in the sky. And thus mirrored, the cliff with its pine-j^atches 
and jagged scars and pure, majestic profile is so much more 
glamourous that one is reminded of Shelley's lines to the pool, 

"In ■which the lovely forests grew 
As in the upper air. 
More perfect both in shape and hue 
Than any spreading there. 

And all was interfused beneath 

With an Elysian glow. 
An atmosphere without a breath, 

A softer day below." 

But the tourists that swarm here like ants on sugar do not 
permit much Shelleyian day-dreaming. For all one's democ- 
racy, for all one's hope of seeing this Valley become the play- 



210 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

ground par excellence of the Americans, one cannot help wish- 
ing at times that they would not cluster quite so thickly upon 
every foreground rock, or exchange musty recollections of 
Weher and Fields with quite such all-pen^asive sonority. 
During my fourth consecutive sunrise a nearby tourist was 
loudly reminded by Tissiack of an artificial mountain on the 
estate of a certain plutocrat in New Jersey, and of how 
the caretaker in showing this tourist around had explained 
that its owner was "off in England attending the incarna- 
tion." 

The most rewarding brief climb about the Valley is to Sierra 
Point, and its discoverer, INIr. Charles Bailey, is justified in 
feeling that it compares well with the longer trips. "To 
Cloud's Rest," he writes in a Sierra Club Bulletin, "we may 
ascribe the most comprehensive view of the Sierra; to Glacier 
Point the most complete view of Yosemite canyons ; to Inspira- 
tion Point, an inspiring view; to El Capitan we will bow as the 
colossal greeting and farewell, and yet declare that Sierra 
Point is the point of beauty, the one altogether lovely." 

It was with a shout of joy and surprise that my companion 
and I first made our way out upon this spit of rock and, looking 
over a sheer face of cliflf, discovered under a group of snow- 
laden firs the contortions of crooked Nevada Falls, and, flow- 
ing like a streamer from under the Liberty Cap, the garlanded 
dignity of Vernal Falls, shot full of delicate color. In 
stately, soft plumes it fell, and sent its foam in scarcely dimin- 
ished pallor to join that from the runways that continued the 
slender, playful falls of Illilouette. 

Then the combined waters shot athwart the Happy Isles as 
though still falling through space, and foamed by the ice- 
planed buttresses jjropping Glacier Point. Down they flashed 
into that piece of old England set so tranquilly among the Alps 
which is the floor of Yosemite, whose evergreen and deciduous 
growth alternated in such sweet symmetry, whose meadows 
were of so velvety a texture, and above which Yosemite Falls 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 211 

with such a gracious majesty, kept pouring its everlasting liba- 
tion out of the clouds. "Do you know?" my companion sud- 
denly exclaimed, "I think this Yosemite gets me more than any 
canyon that ever canyoned ! It 's so stupendous, and at the 
same time so sweet and intimate and lovable." 

The chief distinction of Sierra Point is that it offers a view 
of four of the Valley's important falls. Mr. Chase complains 
that people like falling water better than stationary cliffs. But 
surely this preference is natural. It is based on the same 
causes which make people in general prefer music to sculpture. 
For in falls and other music there is motion and instant, infinite 
variety; but to the enjoyment of cliffs and other sculpture men 
must bring far more of their own dynamic energy and rich- 
ness — more of their own creativeness. And in this modern 
world there is not nearly enough creativeness to go around. 

One of the chief allurements of falling water, as of music, is 
that it spurs the imagination so powerfully and means such dif- 
ferent things to each one of us. To the poetic imagination of 
Miss Harriet JMonroe these Yosemite Falls have meant more 
beautiful things than to any other. With her we feel that the 
soul of Bridal Veil is like a white lUy nodding in the wind. 
IlUlouette is glad "with the gladness of a child, careless of 
danger, waving her hand in the sun." Nevada is "a warrior 
queen whose soul love takes unaware. She goes forth armed 
for battle; of silver is her breastplate, of silver and jewels her 
helmet . . . But suddenly the heart of her is changed. She 
catches up filmy draperies and robes herself like a bride — she 
leaps to her cataract lover on the path of the winds. . . . Stern 
and tall and straight is Vernal, her shining, round-armed lover 
... In him the soul of falling waters is a hero proud of his tri- 
umph ... he hurls the rocks from his path and commands the 
mountain to make way. 

"xVnd Yosemite is a poet in a dream, a poet questioning the 
sky — His dream is of all beautiful things, of moony nights and 
flowers a-film with dew — Always in his house of light and mist 



212 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

he listens and sings and sighs and holds the secret in his heart; 
that none may dream his dream, nor tell his tale of the beauty 
of it." 

The climb to Yosemite Point is made doubly delightful by 
the nearness of this poet among watex'falls. And the trail 
holds one constantly in suspense by its reticent revelation of 
other riches — the increasingly opulent views of the Valley, and 
finally of the world of lofty peaks beyond. 

As one ascends through laurel and live-oak, California lilac, 
the polished manzanita, and through a riot of exuberant 
Yosemite flowers and birds, certain dark stripes down the 
neighboring cliffs begin to look as though some one in a whole- 
sale waj', had been careless with creosote up above ; or as though 
the supernal powers that dwell on the Parnassus of Eagle Peak 
had been tarring and feathering some of the less popular dei- 
ties. On close insjiection these stripes turn out to be bands of 
lichen growth following the courses of the small, corollary 
waterfalls that spread their cobwebbing down all the cliffs dur- 
ing wet weather. 

From near the lip of Yosemite Falls in a time of high water 
you may look directly down upon the torrent and see how it 
strikes a projection in its first leap, exploding every second into 
a skyful of Stardust. The ribbon of cascading stream below 
seems but a meager roadway for the "ramping hosts of warrior 
horse" that are continually charging past. Suddenly the wind 
veers and blows an unpoetic torrent up the cliff's face into 
yours. And you retreat up around the ticklish point of rock 
less carefully than you came down. 

From the vantage of Yosemite Point the Valley no longer 
seems so park-like. From here the evergreens and the brows- 
ing kine are more on the Noali's Ark order, and the rather un- 
gracefully winding !Merced River looks a little as though it had 
been painted by a youngster with no great flair for pigments. 
Even the architecture of the sorry hotel is of just the kind that 
Noah traditionally doted upon. Ajid the cut-and-dried build- 




IIIK IIOVAL ARCHIiS 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 215 

ings and pudgy little tents of Uncle Sam's cavalry complete 
the amusing toy formality of the prospect. 

But then you suddenly lift up your eyes to the hiUs, to the 
portent of riven old Tissiack, to the Sierras in their shrouds 
massed so majestically against the sky of a lowering afternoon 
— and you forget the grotesque figure of Noah and feel instead 
the pathetic sublimity of an Ararat slowly emerging from the 
waste of waters. 

It is not yet fully realized what a splendid place the Yo- 
semite is for adventures, though a number of true adventurers 
have recorded their exploits here. Of them all Mr. John Muir 
seems to be the luckiest and most enthusiastic. He was in at 
the birth of a mountain talus on that night of earthquake when 
Eagle Rock collapsed and came "pouring down to the valley 
floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly 
sublime spectacle — an arc of glowing, passionate fire, fifteen 
hundred feet span, as true in form and as serene in beauty as a 
rainbow in the midst of the stupendous, roaring rockstorm." 

Cutting steps with an ax, he chmbed five hundred feet al- 
most to the crater of the ice cone that Yosemite Fall builds up 
in winter. But he was beaten back by wind and water and 
falling blocks of frozen spray. Once he ventured behind this 
fall to see how the moon looked through the flowing curtain. 
Abruptly the curtain swung in upon him and he was almost 
beaten to death by water-rockets that fell upon his back like so 
many cobblestones. 

He even went coasting on an avalanche, and arrived in one 
minute at the foot of a mountain whose ascent had taken him 
nearly all day. "This flight," he bears witness, "in what might 
be called a Milky AVay of snow-stars, was the most spiritual 
and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experi- 
enced. Elijah's flight in a chariot of fire could hardly have 
been more gloriously exciting." 

Full moonlight in the Yosemite! To stroll beyond the 
lights of the village, cross the river and half a meadow, then see 



216 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

the disk of silver slide out over the sharp-silhouetted Sentinel 
and strike full force against the opposite wall so as to bring out, 
more dramatically than anj'^ sun, its height and varied hues, its 
enormous alcoves and belts of vegetation, — this means to be 
touched by the utmost of mystery and gracious charm mingled 
with awe and majesty that the West has to offer. 

The shadows of the cliff-seams run up well-nigh parallel 
with the boles of cedar and pine, all set off by the unearthly 
radiance of the moonlit crags ; while in the foliage the cataract 
stands like a Carrara column poised in air. One approaches 
nearer and finds himself in an enchanted forest. Under a con- 
tinuous arch of evergreen one wanders with the upper cataract 
always visible through the topmost boughs, until he feels the 
fresh spray drive into his face, "beyond the close of heavy flow- 
ers." Then, emerging at the foot of the lower fall he watches 
the two forming a ladder of foam — adorned now with a 
scarf of lunar rainbows — mounting from the pallid shimmer of 
the Valley floor straight to the single lustrous planet that 
peers over the brow of the cliff. And certain lines of poetry 
come as of themselves to his lips: 

"Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; 
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream 
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem." . . , 

The most ambitious climb in the close neighborhood of the 
Valley is to Cloud's Rest that rises almost ten thousand feet 
above sea level. At nine of a brilliant morning I passed above 
Vernal. The fall was still in shadow. Where the sun caught 
its cur\'e it looked like a tawny-gray cloud with a silver lining. 
Below, it was adorned with dissolving and ever renewed mi- 
rages of flower-gardens where the morning beams jjainted on 
the curtains of mist a mj^riad rainbows, twining the blossoms of 
light into bouquets and garlands over every loop formed by the 
wind-blown spray. As the fairy fillets formed and vanished, I 
could have leaned there forever, enthralled on my parapet of 



THE YO SEMITE VALLEY 217 

rock, watching the unearthly beauty of color answer to and 
harmonize with its corresponding beauty of form. Oh, those 
blithe Yosemite uplands! Surely Siegfried never had in the 
Old World such fresh, sturdy, morn-o'-creation forests wherein 
to wind his horn, as any tourist may have to-day in the New at 
the price of a little perseverance. Those mighty pillars of yel- 
low-plated pine, of cedar and silver fir, those virile flower- 
meadows, those coloratura artists in feathers, those bears, and 
mountain lions and ravening dragons of waterfalls, those lofty 
white fastnesses of eternal frost, — what emironment more fit- 
ting than this might be conceived for Siegfried, the personifica- 
tion of perpetual strength and tingling youth? 

!Mr. Chase has amused himself in these uplands by wonder- 
ing how the Greeks would have populated them with dryads, 
fauns, nymphs and — what Westerners would term — the whole 
formal "outfit" of Parnassian and Olympian divinities. But I 
repine, rather, that our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the an- 
cient Teutons, did not have these gorges and domes, these iri- 
descent cataracts, rock-shaking rapids and pure, profound 
lakes wherein to bestow their Wotans and Freyas and Fosse- 
grims, their Fafners and Rhine maidens — and here fittingly 
environ their wild and romantic mythology. 

For how far more manly and mysterious and soul-compelhng 
is this region than the trifling woodlands of the Black Forest or 
the Hartz or the Baltic plain where was cradled the old Teu- 
tonic religion. What a puny sajjling the sacred tree Yggdrasil 
must have been at a time when the stump of one of our sequoias 
would have furnished throne space for a whole dynasty of Teu- 
tonic deities! And the hilt of the great sword Nothung, pro- 
truding from the same, — would it have seemed more than a 
twig on that gigantic envelope of bark? 

A cloud was performing with abandon its appointed func- 
tion on Cloud's Rest when I scrambled up the final snow-drift 
to the sunmiit. As far as sight-seeing went I might as well 
have had my head in a bag. After an hour's wait I was just 



218 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

departing sad and viewless when the cloud blew up as abruptly 
as an umbrella at the base of a sky-scraper. It disclosed the 
terrible profile of Tissiack who ranged menacing out above all 
else like some prehistoric monster, apparently confronting the 
brooding forehead of El Capitan. And between them they 
vertically framed the gentle floor of Yosemite, awash with 
purple haze. From Insjiiration Point the view of the Valley 
had been more charming, more pleasantly diversified. From 
here it was more solemn, rugged and elemental. 

This then, was before me. But on either hand and far be- 
hind were vmfolded cycle on epicycle of the gittering, grandly 
composed peaks of the high Sierras, "lonely-looking though so 
many," as Mr. Bradford Torrey once observed ; "a magnificent 
panorama of . . . minarets and domes, obelisks and battle- 
mented walls." 

The single touch of the infernal that I found in this region 
of bliss came as I picked my path home in the dusk through 
curtains of drenching spray, down the dim, slimy steps close be- 
side Vernal Falls. Despite the fairy grotto near the top, the 
place had an untoward atmosphere, as though it were the lair 
of evil genii of crag and stream, who meant to pen too in- 
quisitive tourists in caverns for their sins. 

To leave the Yosemite Valley without spending a night 
above it on Glacier Point would almost be like seeing Hamlet 
without Hamlet. It was an ideal preparation for the coming 
sunset to sit on the edge of the mile-deep gorge and watch 
Grizzly Peak lower his shadow athwart the face of Vernal, 
changing to gray his yellowish green, while across the main 
Valley crept the shadow-picture of the north wall like the 
knowledge of some common disaster creeping along in a family 
from member to member until even the child in the cradle feels 
dimly the chill of its presence. 

Sunset began ^vith a flush of robin's-egg over the frosted 
rock-waves to the south. That evening the ridge-pole of 
JNIount Hoffman seemed the objective point of all the clouds in 




H-HJi 



V OS KM I IK VALLKV FROM AKIISIS' I'OIM 
Bridal Veil Kail oil right. El Cipitall on left. Half-Dome and Cloud's Rest in haekKround 



ji 



II 



il 



THE YOSEMITE VALLEY 221 

the vault of heaven. Golden, violet, saffron and rose, they 
began a march toward their mountain goal, above whose 
flanks, now bathed in the Alpenglow, a pink-scaled dragon 
ramped, extending his ribbed neck toward the zenith. The 
western masses deei:)ed from rose to purple, then sharpened to 
an incandescent orange and sent up blood red pinnacles and 
turrets. 

"Each purple peak, each flinty spire, 
Was bathed in floods of living fire. 
But not a setting beam could glow 
Within the dark ravines below." 

The eastern ridges turned lavender. From among them a 
full-orbed moon disengaged itself and swung over the Little 
Yosemite. Then, swiftly, the domes of the valley, under low 
clouds whose edges were now the hue of sunlit Burgundy, died 
to the hue of bleached bones. 

When at last the pageant was over Alec, the guide, and I 
collected logs and armfuls of giant cones and made a fire on 
the brink of the Valley. For we were good friends of Camp 
Curry just beneath. I lay stretched at full length on Over- 
hanging Rock watching Alec who, brave in scarlet sweater 
and emerald kerchief swung blazing, oil-soaked bags full of 
rocks about his fierce head while the moon kindly made of the 
clouds a proper background. Then he hurled them up and out 
in a splendid arc and they hurtled upon their long journey 
amid the faint huzzas of Camp Curry, whose Stentor roared 
up at us his astonisliingly articulate gratitude. 

As the moon climbed higher the shadow which the descending 
sun had spread over the Valley from the further side was with- 
drawn. Tissiack stood in indescribable state, scored with fine 
shadow-furrowings and ridges of light. Now the forest- 
clothed valley floor, like a dark lake, sent out estuaries into the 
heart of the glimmering crags, while its camp-fires flamed redly 
up. The lights of village and army post made a little city in 



222 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

the midst of all. The waterfalls Avere faint streaks of foam, 
but their crashings came to the ear like the distant roar of some 
mighty metropolis. 

If you would know the utmost mystery and holiness of 
nature, spend a night alone on Glacier Point under the stars 
and awake when dawn is beginning to sharpen the snow-peaks. 
Then, before the day's tourists arrive, sit for a few hours in 
the warming sunlight on that brink and steep yourself in 
grandeur and beauty and the very peace of God that passes all 
understanding. 

It was Memorial Day when I awoke to such an experience — 
the day of reconciliation and universal brotherhood. And the 
conviction stole over me that if all the armies and all the rem- 
nants of all the armies of earth might once be gathered together 
on such a height, war must assuredly cease from among men, 
and the era of fraternity dawn like the sun that lay flashing on 
the pinnacle of ]Mount Florence. 




A KIl-T IN 11 IF, WALLS 



VIII 
THE GRAND CANYON 

IN describing how it feels to look for the first time into the 
depths of the Grand Canyon, it has become customary 
for literary folk to portray their sensations in some such 
striking way as this: 
"One glance was enough. My brain reeled and I recoiled 
in grisly terror from the brink. Casting myself upon my 
knees and clasping my companion about his, I besought liim 
with tears to take me awaj'." 

Now if, before visiting Arizona, I had visited the travel al- 
cove of the public library, I, too, on reaching the famous brink, 
would doubtless have known some of this grisly terror. But as 
mj' habit is not to read about places until after seeing them 
through eyes un-bespectacled by literature, the mile depth of 
the abj'ss actually terrorized me no more than had the deeps of 
the smiling Yosemite. Nor were the dozen miles of air be- 
tween rim and rim terrifying, nor the gorge's two hundred and 
seventeen miles of length — for only a very few of these miles 
were in evidence. Nor did I succumb even to the fact which 
unerringly bowls over a certain type of American mind, 
namely, that if all the main and side canyons of the Colorado 
River were placed end to end, they would nearly girdle the 
globe. 

Indeed, that first glimpse did not awe or intimidate me at all. 
It filled me instead with a chaotic sense of power and tranquil 
beauty and sublimity that deepened, strengthened, clarified as 
the confused masses of dome and battlement and spire, of 
fretted cornice and pinnacle, terrace and turret below gradu- 

S35 



226 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

ally disengaged and defined themselves, and as the variety and 
marvel of the color-scheme sank into my soul, — a color-scheme 
as protean as that of an ingot of white-hot steel cooling rapidly 
under a sunset sky. 

In looking over the standard accounts of literary terror at 
first sight of the Canyon, from Stoddard and Warner to James, 
one wonders why they should be so curiously hysterical. It is 
almost as though some pioneer word-painter of the Canyon had 
seen it first at some particularly forbidding moment, — it may 
be with a tempest going on in its heart — or his own — or even in 
both at once; and as though subsequent writers, having studied 
his account before the journey, had instructed their own emo- 
tional systems to behave no less vividly than the pioneer's had 
behaved. 

The result is that, under the influence of such writings, many 
tourists arrive expecting to shrink from a grisly inferno — and 
accordingly shrink from a grisly inferno. While others more 
sincere and less suggestible, not feeling in the least neurotic, 
are slightly disappointed, both in the place and in themselves. 
For this Canyon has been fully as much injured by having its 
somberness laid on too thick as that other "Grand Canj^on" up 
in the Yellowstone has been injured by having its gorgeousness 
laid on too thick. 

Now if these folk had arrived with minds as unprepossessed 
as a fresh film, I think that they would have found, not an in- 
ferno, but a titanic, unterrible mixture of the purgatorio and 
the paradiso, — "a paradox of chaos and repose of gloom and 
radiance; a despair and a joy; a woe and an ecstasy." 

On first peering into the gulf, my first sensation, as a matter 
of fact, was simply one of relief that this wonder of the world 
was not disappointing in the way that wonders of the world are 
apt to be. It was the hour when the shadows begin to lengthen 
into sunset, and the sublimity of the sight was tempered by an 
iridescent mellowness of hue more exhilarating than anything 
in my experience outside of some such masterpiece of conscious 



THE GRAND CANYON 227 

coloring as an artist like Rembrandt occasionally achieved. 
And I thought how nearly right a certain New Mexican on 
the train had been. As I had sat audibly enjoying the red 
earth, the bright rocks backed by snow-mountains, and the 
])rilliant blankets of the Indians, he had remarked : "You 've 
never seen color if you have n't seen the Grand Canyon!" 

The structure of this father of gorges may best be imagined 
by thinking of a huge inverted mountain range reacliing down 
into the earth instead of up into the sky; where the moun- 
tains are valleys and the valleys, mountains ; where, though the 
plateaus remain plateaus, the mountain spurs become side can- 
yons, and a thundering torrent tears along the range's inverted 
ridge. It is the real land of topsy-turvy. There you start 
doicn-h[\l with the mountahi ascender's adventurous feelings 
coml)ined with the mountain descender's winged ease. There 
looking down into the earth's bowels gives you the same sense 
of sublimity which is yours elsewhere only when you lift your 
eyes to the strength of the hills. There you find at the bottom 
the absolute solitude characteristic of lonely peaks; and toil 
skpvards, emerging out of a blazing desert only to find a bliz- 
zard enveloping the hotel at the top. 

If ^lammoth Cave is the prototype of all underworlds, then 
the city of temples in the heart of the Grand Canyon is the 
prototype of all haunts of vmearthly majesty, of dim, mys- 
terious beauty, — all Ninevehs and Babylons, all Hesperides 
and pleasure-realms of Kubla Khan. Its towers and jeweled 
walls are fresh and sparkhng with the hues of eternal youth, 
but the roof-slopes of talus are hoary as with the dust of all 
time, or look as if coated with primeval ooze from the sub- 
sidence of some immernorially vanished ocean. And this im- 
pression is deepened when one reflects how few of these slopes, 
since first they saw the chill, glacial sunlight, have ever known 
the touch of humankind. 

At times the Canyon is the most ethereal of earthly sights 
presenting to mortal view the sort of city one has dreamed 



228 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

of inhabiting after death among the irised mountains of the 
star Aldebaran. To my mind the best description of this 
aspect is to be found in a certain good book among the last 
few pages before the concordance and the maps of Palestine. 
JNIore potently than any other natural landscape this gorge 
suggests the infinite. 

It is related that Lord Curzon once met a German traveler 
on the slopes of the Himalayas, and the latter remarked: 
"What iss dis for a fine view! Dere gifes only one more mag- 
nificent in all de vorld." "Quite so," answered Lord Curzon. 
"That is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado." "Correct!" 
cried the other heartily. And they shook hands on it. 

There are two chief ways of seeing the Canyon: from above 
and from below. For a real idea of the place both views are 
required; the starthng intimacies of the plateau and river-level 
complementing the rim's far-spread panoramas. 

Before venturing down the rather startling steeps and straits 
of the Bright Angel Trail on mules wliich strongly prefer the 
outer half-inch of things, one naturally cultivates the rim for 
a time. It is essential to sit for hours together on one of those 
promonotories like the one called INIaricopa, that send their 
sharp prows cutting out into the void like great wingless air- 
ships preparing for a reconnaissance over the dream-city be- 
low. You should linger there on a day of floating cloud, and 
watch some temple like Isis play the chameleon. Now it is 
a dull, dark red splotched with gray. Presently stripes of 
sunlight creep up its roots, conjuring the buff layers of the foun- 
dation to a dim purple, changing to pink the ruddy lower 
story, and to a golden brown the profound red of the upper 
sandstone walls; tinging the deeper red of the roof with pur- 
ple, and the foot of the cupola with the hues of ripening wheat- 
fields, while only its chalky top remains as it was. 

Now the sun, retracing his path down to the river, finds the 
flame-hued jets of that rare stratum called Algonkian, dear 
to the geological heart, — jets that seem like so many flashes 







A SIOHM I'ASSIM; u\ 1,R nil. lANVUN 



THE GRAND CANYON 231 

from subterranean furnace-rooms. Them it alchemizes 
through vermiHon to a fierce orange. 

INIeantime you have a distressed feeling that miracles no less 
noteworthy are being performed on Cheops, Buddha, Brahma 
and a dozen of the other ornately chiseled jMount ^Vashingtons 
of painted rock that are grouped down there above the invisible 
rage of the river. And you almost wish that you were so 
squint-eyed that you could watch two things at the same time. 

When the shadows are long the Canyon is so much more in- 
teresting than when they are short that at noon it almost sinks 
b}' comparison to the commonplace. Artists feel this strongl3\ 
"Do you know," said JNIr. Joseph Pennell, "for me this thing- 
has simply existed between sunrise and seven, and from a little 
before sunset, on." Of the two times I prefer the latter; for 
the colors of dawn are usually spent before the sun is high 
enough to strike into the gorge. And among the various 
points of vantage, I would choose the promontory called Hopi, 
for its wider outlook and for the sheer drop of three thousand 
feet underneath. Seen from there one particular night- 
fall stands out clearly in memory, — a nightfall worlds away 
from my recent Yosemite sunset. The temi^les opposite were 
half aflame, half draped in monstrous, serrated tiers of shadow 
that constantly brought out undreamed of contours, creeping 
higher in a steady accelerando until only the limestone caps 
were left in the light. From the Uinta Mountains of Utah a 
formidable torpedo of cloud came sailing to poise over the gulf, 
turning tawny first at the edges, and then, as the sun went 
under in a blare of brass, becoming gold above, and beneath, 
a somber purple. 

Suddenly came the turning point. ^list crept up the gorge. 
The torpedo relapsed to bleakness. Tlie western brass 
turned slate. A bitter wind swept the rim. Even the fires in 
the temple basements seemed to smolder. And in a trice para- 
diso had changed to purgatorio. 

At such times one lends a sympathetic ear to the quaint abo- 



232 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

riginal legends of the Canyon's origin. According to the 
Wallapais the abyss was made single-handed, after a certain 
flood, by their cultus hero Pack-i-tha-a-wi. This popular 
leader was the spiritual progenitor of a later, and almost 
equally energetic American hero. He was armed with a large 
flint knife and a big stick. Once upon a time the world was 
covered so deep with water that nobody knew what to do until 
Pack-i-tha-a-wi took the initiative. The knife he thrust deep 
into the heart of the earth, hammering it in with the big stick 
and moving it strenuously back and forth until the Canyon was 
formed, which drew all the water from off the earth into the 
Sunset Sea. 

]Major Powell, the first white man to go through the whole 
Canyon, retails another Indian account of its origin, a legend 
whose poetic charm offsets the Wallapais' vigorous realism. 

"Long ago there was a great and wise chief wlio mourned 
the death of his wife and would not be comforted until Ta- 
vwoats, one of the Indian gods, came to him and told him she 
was in a happier land, and offered to take him there that he 
might see for himself, if, upon his return, he would cease to 
mourn. The great chief promised. Then Ta-vwoats made a 
trail through the mountains that intervene between that beau- 
tiful land, the balmy region in the great west, and tliis, the 
desert home of the poor Numa. 

"That trail was the canyon gorge of the Colorado. 
Through it he led him; and, when they had returned, the deity 
exacted from the chief a promise that he would tell no one of 
the joys of that land, lest, through discontent with the cir- 
cumstances of this world, they should desire to go to heaven. 
Then he rolled a river into the gorge, a broad, raging stream, 
that should engulf any that might attempt to enter thereby." 

"]\Iore than once," continues the ]\Iajor, "I have been warned 
by the Indians not to enter this canyon. They considered it 
disobedience to the gods and contempt for their authority, and 
believed it would surely bring upon one tlieir wrath." 



II 




IN I UK (il.OW Of SlNSliT 



THE GRAND CANYON 235 

Nor is this interpretation without substantial foundation. 
Ajid manj' a brave fellow has verified it by being dashed down 
the ravening Colorado into the land of the hereafter. 

More recent cosmologists agree that the Grand Canyon is 
the most graphic of geology lessons, — a perfectly preserved 
cross-section of JNIother Earth shced off for demonstration pur- 
poses in that grand manner which nature habitually adopts in 
the south-west. Written in clear characters on these huge ta- 
bles of stone we may read how the original black Archean 
mountains wrinkled up out of the primeval waters, were planed 
down by wave and wind, frost and rain, sank beneath the sur- 
face to receive as sediment, and compress into rock, twelve 
thousand feet of orange and vermilion Algonkian; then rose 
again to have all but five hundred feet of the latter washed 
down into the Gulf of California. All this was so early in the 
morning of the world that vertebrate life had not yet come out 
of the sea to begin its march toward manliood. 

Then the buff Tonto sandstone and shale of Cambrian times 
was laid down and emerged to hold its head above water for 
three geological periods, diving again only in time to receive 
the three principal strata of the Carboniferous era. First of 
these came the pink of the red-wall limestone, widest and love- 
liest of all the "vast ribbons of landscape." On top of this was 
laid down the gray and brownish red of the cross-bedded sand- 
stone, while what is to-day the uppermost thousand feet was 
formed into a creamy-hued mass commonly known as the 
Cherty lime. While these were being pushed up into the air, 
liuge glacier-born rivers from the mountains were constantly 
gouging them, tearing and smashing and grinding out a thou- 
sand Niagara gorges and Yosemites of side canyons, and fin- 
ally uniting to form that mighty Colorado River which was 
destined to gash out of the heart of the world its greatest 
wonder. 

It is the contrast in color and texture between these six or 
seven principal strata that lends the Grand Canyon its su- 



236 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

preme distinction. This was vividly brought out by Major 
Powell when he wrote: "A wall of homogeneous granite like 
that in the Yosemite is but a naked wall, whether it be 1,000 
or 5,000 feet high. Hundreds and thousands of feet mean 
nothing to the eye when they stand in a meaningless front. A 
mountain covered by pure snow 10,000 feet liigh has but little 
more effect on the imagination than a mountain of snow 1,000 
feet high — it is but more of the same thing; but a facade 
of seven systems of rock has its sublimity multiplied seven- 
fold." 

Before taking mule for the lower regions, the average trav- 
eler is obsessed by the illusion that he can gain a quite sufficient 
idea of the Canyon without leaving the rim. Once below, 
however, he finds that until then he had scarcely begun to real- 
ize what the place was like. For example, he finds that his 
imagination had not been capable of grasping the fact that he 
stood directly over just such alcoves and pinnacles and prom- 
ontories, such grotesque buttes and thrilling bands of painted 
precipice as he had been admiring far away beyond the river. 
Also he finds that it had not been possible before to comj)rehend 
their size and dramatic picturesqueness. 

To go from rim to river of the Yosemite is like passing from 
Norway to Italy. But here at any season the trip from rim 
to river is equivalent to a level journey several hundred miles 
farther. And in the spring the contrast is even more marked 
— rather like passing in three hours from Denmark, say, to 
northern Africa. What a pleasure it is to find the upper 
world's barren ten inches of snow thinning as one descends to 
meet the spring. Where leaves and buds first appear come the 
sweetly cliirped doAvnward chromatics of the rock wren. The 
Indian Paint Brush stands there already dipped in that ver- 
milion so dear to the aboriginal heart, prepared to put in some 
of the landscape's characteristically fiery tones. The mustard 
contributes its buttercup yellows, the phlox its blues and whites. 



THE GRAND CANYOX 237 

and the redbud tree its cornucopia of carnelian blossoms, the 
haunt of butterfly and humming-bird. 

Then, by little and little, comes the change to the desert 
where sage-brush and greasewood and the wicked looking mes- 
quit provide lurking places for fox and jack-rabbit and the 
humorous lizard wallows in the fierce sunlight. There the cac- 
tus, the rose of the desert, displays its cluster of neat Keep- 
Off -the-Grass signs, or its water-barrel — the final resort of the 
famished wanderer. There the century plant hangs its grace- 
ful head like the marble ciborium of Nuremberg, and raises 
on every headland a bannerless flag-staff. 

Everj-^ one dismounts and walks down the steep place known 
as Jacob's Ladder. And at about this point even the most 
nen'ous woman in the trail-party becomes finally convinced of 
the infallibility of mules and roundly asserts that she would n't 
have missed all this fun for anytliing. After my fourth trip 
down the Bright Angel Trail, however, I heard the one who 
had coined this remark qualify it as follows: "Would n't have 
missed it for a hundred dollars. Wouldn't repeat it for a 
thousand." 

Below Jacob's Ladder one approaches a ruddy bastion that 
should, I supjiose, be called the Drydock, supporting as it 
does the crag known as the Battleship. The Drydock sets off 
the ruby base of purple-butted Buddha four miles beyond, with 
its reverential limestone cap. And I could never pass tliis 
place without seeming to catch my first genuine glimpse of the 
vastness and wild beauty of the West, its freshness and elemen- 
tal freedom. 

Long before you can see the river from the plateau, thirteen 
hundred feet above, its roar bursts up out of that imier 
Archtcan gorge which has the power of looking just as viciously 
repellent in full sunlight as in the coldest, wettest rain that ever 
ran down inside a pair of riding boots. Finally you come to 
where those black, unstratified walls tower above the mud and 
turbulence of the Colorado. The river appears to be running 



238 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

with the speed of an ordinary train, and with as inhuman un- 
concern as a joy-rider's. 

Standing beside this fiercest of earthly rivers, one cannot 
forbear a silent tribute of wonder and admiration to the heroes 
who have braved its perils. The foremost of these was ]\Iajor 
Powell, the dauntless pioneer, w^ho in 1869, though he had been 
crippled in the Civil War, took the first boat through the un- 
charted waters of ^Marble and Grand Canyons, never knowing 
at what moment he might round a turn and be swept resistlessly 
over some imknown Niagara. 

Since then the annals of the Colorado have been replete with 
thrills. And that courage is not dying out is shown by the 
fact that one of the most daring of the few successful voyages 
through the Canyon was finished on January 18, 1912. Two 
brothers, Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, covered in rowboats the 
fourteen hundred miles from Green River, Wyoming, in a hun- 
dred perilous days. They were the fifth part)' that had ever 
accomphshed the voyage. 

This is part of the tale the younger brother told me one 
evening on the rim: "Four miles below Bass's tramway on 
Christmas day I got dra^v^l into one of those maelstroms where 
about two feet of water pours over a rock twenty-five feet high, 
and then the wave doubles back and forms a Avhirlpool, and 
dashes a fellow from side to side. I glanced back and saw 
that my brother's boat was wedged against a rock at the head 
of the rapid. ]My boat turned over and I kept hold of the 
gunwale. Then it was righted so violently as to wrench mj' 
hold loose and I was whirled heels over head into the channel. 
Though I had on a life preserver I was in no shape for swim- 
ming. I came to the surface possibly fifty feet below and 
had time only for one breath of air, before I was sucked under 
again. Then a series of big waves caught me and knocked 
me back and forth till I got to the place where I was making 
gurgling noises in my throat and guess I began to wonder 
what was going to happen. I was sure I was going to be car- 



THE GRAND CANYOX 239 

ried through the next rapid and quit struggling so as to try 
and get a little breath and strength. 

"But just then a wave broke and seemed to throw me into 
a quieter current and I saw I had a chance for life. So I put 
out everj'thing that was in me and struck ground just twenty 
feet above that rapid. The water was way below freezing 
point, but I just lay there till I got back strength to crawl out. 
]My brother had smashed a hole in his boat. So we camiJed 
down right there on the ice-covered rocks and found half a 
dozen pieces of driftwood and cooked our Christmas tlinner." 

Once the traveler discovers how deceptively safe locomotion 
is in these Arizona depths, and how httle of the Canyon he can 
see from the rim or from the Bright Angel Trail, he begins to 
long for a closer acquaintance with it, far from the distracting 
comedie humaine of tourist parties. Accordingly I took a 
three days' camping trip on the plateau with guide and pack 
train, down stream along the old Tonto Trail, a path begun 
ages ago by those herds of mountain sheep that are still oc- 
casionallj' met with in remote corners of the Canyon. 

The morning I set out on this jaunt the temples, shimmering 
in the strong sunlight, looked as if painted by ^Monet or Childe 
Hassam with the modern dab-technic, — one bit of primary color 
dabbed down beside another. Relieved against an aerial sea 
full of level, creamy cloud-islands, Dana Butte stood up like 
a magnified St. Paul's. Across from it the Tower of Set with 
stately bastion and fine flat dome was stealing away the inter- 
est of the mesa-like Temple of Horus. Shiva, the hugest of 
the temples, showed ineffective beyond the supreme beauty of 
Isis. Osiris . . . but enough! For one might run on thus 
about these stupendous buildings mitil one had outdone tlie 
garrulity of Homer's catalogue of the ships — yet scarcely be- 
gin the subject. 

Over the ears of Irene, my mule, I looked above the billow- 
ing green plateau to the deep red rock-ribbons and farther still 
to the tender yellows and creams of Hopi Point with its Ro- 



240 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

manesque pinnacles, and wondered why the creators of our 
churches and office-buildings, our state capitols and Fifth Ave- 
nue palaces did not come here to mine suggestions for a new 
and really American style of architecture. 

But later, from our camp on Horn Creek, as I lay looking 
up at the rim through half closed eyes, it seemed as if these 
architects had already been there and had poised a row of 
creamy sky-scrapers above an unimaginable rampart of brick. 
Next morning, however, in another light, these buildings 
seemed suddenly to have aged by several centuries and to have 
become a line of medieval castles. In numerous spots the trail 
developed an even more intense interest than the landscape. 
The guide declared it to be the roughest trail negotiable by 
mules that he knew of anywhere. At times our steeds would 
gather themselves together and leap with sure-footed frenzy 
up places that impressed me as resembling nothing so much as 
the side of a small house, and a glass house, at that. 

My last vivid recollection of this trip is of pausing on the 
rim near the head of the Hermit Trail, surveying a while the 
depths I had rolled from (mule-wise) to the heights. All at 
once I heard floating up from a great distance the sustained 
notes of a certain well-known singer who had passed us on the 
trail. And that clear, high soprano outshone my dearest recol- 
lections of goat-herds piping Theocritean melodies in the moun- 
tains of Sicily, by as much as the glory of this gorgeful of 
sunset-colored mountains outshines the glorj^ of ^tna in erup- 
tion. 

Speaking of Sicily, the nomenclature of the Canyon, though 
recently bestowed, can bear comparison with the names of 
Sicilian mountains, islands and promontories. Of course, it 
seems a little anachronistic to talk in terms of Egypt and India 
about temples that stood here finished in every detail some 
asons before Karnak or DeUii had attained even that measure 
of civilization which Albuquerque boasts to-day. But how 
much more adequate are names like Cheops and Zoroaster 



it 



THE GRAND CANYON 241 

than the half-baked appellations that disfigure our other west- 
ern wonderlands! I was delighted not to find any Inspiration 
Point here though the Yoseniite and the Yellowstone each boast 
one, and the Pike's Peak country, two. Neither was there an 
Artist's Point or an Exclamation Point, or a waterfall named 
The Widow's Tears. Neither did His Satanic Lowness seem 
to keep in reserve quite such a department storeful of mis- 
cellanea as he keeps in the other places. Then too, the fine 
old aboriginal names are as plentiful here as they are scarce 
there; and the Canyon's godfathers have made a wisely im- 
aginative use, as well, of Greek, Teutonic and oriental my- 
thology. 

The trip down the river had only whetted my appetite to 
go up the river. As I started up the Tonto Trail in the com- 
pany of that prince among guides, Bill Huggett, the tem- 
ples were unusually bright. An evening rain had freshened 
up their colors; and upon each a pine-tree of cloud rested 
lightly. It might have been smoke and incense pouring up 
from their high altars as though sacrifice on a commensurate 
scale were at length being offered up to the god of abysses. 

"Bill," I remarked, "I 've never seen such clouds or such 
a blue sky anywhere else but in Italy." "Well," returned 
Bill with the empirical conviction of the true Westerner, "I 
don't b'lieve Italy 's got us skinned much on the blue sky, 
either." 

High in the red wall limestone I was amused to discover 
a sort of shallow cave which, in that particular light, looked 
like a shadow box enclosing one of the heroic figures of those 
Elgin ^Marbles that disport themselves forever in the British 
Museum. But next instant it was transformed, by a passing 
shadow, into Saint-Gaudens' relief of Stevenson prop])ed up 
in bed and smoking a cigarette. The reader is warned, how- 
ever, that this phenomenon, like many of the most desirable 
things in life, must be viewed from a respectful distance. 



242 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Otherwise it changes shockingly into a pert modern sphinx. 

It is strange how vividly such things as tliis claim one's at- 
tention down there. Tliis is perhaps due to air of such a 
clarity that one can see with the naked eye a telegraph wire 
on the rim four miles away in a bee line. And more than 
once I wondered why those enterprising merchants who have 
defaced most of our choicest landscapes with their bill-boards 
had not here also overridden the popular will, and splashed 
the Canyon's incomparable wall-spaces full of exhortations to 
partake, say, of Pritchard's Pink Tea for Paranoia. 

We met, and pursued, numerous herds of the wild burros 
whose ancestors had been turned loose by early prospectors 
to multiply and replenish the desert. They regarded us 
calmly from the hillsides, with the sunlight nestling in their 
fawn-colored velvet, with pointed ears erect and fathomless 
wisdom in their humorous eyes. 

Architectural wonders began with the discovery of a splen- 
did Romanesque cathedral, — and never ceased. From our 
first camp the shelving sides of Lone Tree Canyon framed the 
Angel's Gate. It raised its symmetrical turreted portal above 
an ancient city wall of sandstone with wicked Archaean out- 
Avorks, a flaming mass of ruby against sunset clouds of bright 
lavender — a gateway too magnificent for any angels but those 
of the nobility like Gabriel, JNIichael and Raphael. 

On the waj' up the Grand View Trail to Horseshoe ]Mesa 
we explored a miniature ^Mammoth Cave which had this ad- 
vantage over the larger cavern, that it was comparatively un- 
stained by smoke and by the autographic seeker after 
marked-down immortality. There was one hall that measured 
fifty by sixty by twenty-five, and a passage at least seventy- 
five feet high. We found virgin stalactites ten feet long, and 
whole fairy fringes of smaller ones, with curtains of yellow 
gj'psum and banks of onyx. There are said to be from two to 
thi*ee miles of passages. It seemed hardly fair that the Grand 
Canyon, the supreme wonder of the world, should in this cav- 





I llli CANVii-, 



THE GRAND CANYON 245 

ern go so far toward pilfering the unique distinction of Ken- 
tucky's one prize ewe lamb. 

There is a place on Horseshoe INIesa where one may sit and 
look almost straight down a thousand feet to the plateau, and 
indulge in the youthful sport of rock-rolling without fear of 
the rocks falling near any trail below. It was a positive es- 
thetic delight to see how elastically they caromed out from 
the walls, leaping as though suddenly informed with the tem- 
peraments of tigers. And when after a long interval they 
struck the plain, they would plot out their careers in extended 
series of dust-puffs, that looked as though the enemy had 
opened fire. 

But it was best of all to lift one's eyes from the dust and 
feast them on the sublime beauties of the Canyon, now near 
enough to be intimate, yet far enough to be mysterious. Once 
again I sit and marshal you all, you towers and temples and 
entablatures, you friezes and fa9ades, minarets and snow-pow- 
dered peaks, you pillars of erosion and bold-faced buttes; deli- 
cate, divine Isis far in the west, backed by the rugged virilitj' 
of Shiva, quaint Buddha, martial Zoroaster, Deva of the sub- 
tle roundings, ethereal Gate of the Angels, huge blunt bulk 
of Wotan's Throne, four-square to all the winds, jet looking 
over as if in yearning to the Walhalla Glades of the northland; 
last and best, you Saint Peter-like dome, dedicated to no 
Cliristian saint but to the ancient Vishnu, yet more ancient 
than he : — I love you all ; I shall carry you always in my heart. 

From the rim of Grand View the temples are not so inti- 
mate and lovely as from the INIesa, but they are more imposing 
and majestic. Grand View, however, is too grandly compre- 
hensive. It offers not a picture but a panorama. And it piles 
up the myriad components of the great and lesser canyons, 
tier on tier, and upon these the views of the Painted Desert 
and its mountains, until one turns away giddy, bewildered, 
glutted with too many heaped up epics of beauty and grandeur. 

Grand View drags your attention in more simultaneous di- 



246 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

rections than that questionable form of composition known 
as opera, which aims to increase men's enjoyment of art by 
inducing them to divide their attention up among five arts 
at the same instant. But if only you can blind yourself to all 
but certain narrower aspects of the scene, that is a different 
story. For example, shut out of consciousness everything but 
the single vignette made by the furnace fires between the 
wicked old gorge and the grandeur that is Vishnu, with 
the wide S of the river a bit to the right, surmounted by the 
palisaded parapet of the Canyon wall and just a thought of 
the dreamy distances of the Painted Desert. If j'ou can do 
that you will perhaps enjoy j-ourself here even more than at 
El Tovar. 

At any rate, on returning from such a plateau jaunt, you 
W'ill decide that this riding over vertical Tonto trails and sleep- 
ing out in a bag under the stars beneath three thousand feet 
of Rhenish castles and Egyptian temples and hanging gardens 
from the mountains of the moon, — is the sort of elixir that 
ought to restore the flush of youth and enthusiasm to the parch- 
ment cheeks of a very Rameses. 

At the pleasant log inn of El Tovar on the rim, there are 
certain blank books wherein visitors are suffered to record their 
impressions of the Canyon. And it is curious to note the 
rhythmic regularity with which these cosmopolitan inscriptions 
oscillate between the subhme and the ridiculous. 

To a certain gentleman from Indiana the Canyon suggests 
immortality ; to a German professor, the second part of Faust. 
Following these a California lady puts down: "Grand — and 
then some," and Casey Jones, U.S.A. exclaims: "Oh, hell! 
A^liere's the bottom?" 

A pilgrim from the "coral strand" of Cairo, Egypt, who 
■was evidently not pleased with his guide, quotes: 

"Where every prospect pleases 
And only man is vile." 



THE GRAND CANYON 247 

A divine from South Dakota inquires: "Did St. John in 
his vision on Patnios get a glimpse of a more glorious work 
of God then this?" Then, after some similar inquiries and ex- 
clamations by other devout tourists, a female from Keokuk 
confesses: "All I can say is 'JNIy, my.'" 

"He putteth forth his hand upon the rock," quotes one from 
Illinois. "He overturneth the mountains by the roots. He 
cutteth out rivers among the rocks." 

And immediately below this a Kansan writes: "If the Lord 
had kept on, 't would have been too late for a bottom." 

"No place for an atheist!" Avarns a disapproving New 
Yorker. Then, after an Austrian has parodied Horace about 
the mountains being in labor; and others have done portions 
of the Magnificat and a selection from the book of Revelation, 
a gentleman from Toledo cries: 

"Stick a darning needle in me, I want to wake up." 

I drew one conclusion from a study of these books. It was 
that people who come here usually attempt to take in over- 
much beauty and sublimity at one time and are overpowered 
by it. Now the Canj'on is too heady a potion to absorb in 
deep draughts. One should borrow a hint from those who 
squint at an eclipse through smoked glasses or through a pin- 
hole in a card. 

It seems to me that some of the most exquisite pleasures I 
have had in Arizona have come from some sudden bit of vivid 
contrast, as when I was standing one afternoon on the Rim 
Road near the Hermit Trail, letting my eyes range over the 
vastness of the Coconino Forest, and over what looked like a 
waste of waters near the horizon. Suddenly I wheeled can- 
yon-wards and caught between the branches a small vignette 
of purple and crimson temple with the long shadows clustering 
thick upon it. To the sense of sight this brought as keen a 
pleasure as is brought to the sense of touch by a dash of cool 
water on the wrists after a parching trek through the desert. 

No effect ever seemed more tenderlv sublime than the sud- 



248 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

den sight of the sunlit Canyon as I gazed once from Pima 
Point through the fringe of a heavy snow storm that extended 
only far enough into the void to create a veil. This veil sof- 
tened the colors and contours and the sharp shadows as no mist 
on window pane or half closed eyelids could ever do. And 
while on the far horizon the clouds still puffed light as thistle- 
down in the pale turquoise heavens, that whole vale of temple- 
mountains fairly yearned upwards to God. 

The Grand Canyon is too grand for steady diet. It is so 
fair, so overwhelmingly impressive that two or three weeks of 
it are enough to saturate the most devoted lover of beauty. 
You can not continue indefinitely on that exalted emotional 
level. In the parlance of the connoisseur of paintings, the 
Canyon is a "museum-piece." To spend day after day with 
those temples always in view would be rather like having life- 
sized coines of the tombs of the ^Medici in your dining-room or 
"The Last Judgment" on the parlor ceiling, or having a wife 
who could not ask you to pass the parsnips without couching 
her request in terms of "Paradise Lost." 

If, on the other hand, the beauty-lover turns away at the 
psychological moment, he departs with a body effervescing 
with the vigor it has stored up on the life-giving trails below, 
and a heart full of joy and wonder. 

Only let him for a time beware of going anywhere else on 
earth! For the Zambesi, the Yellowstone, the fjords of Nor- 
way, Switzerland, the Rocky IMountains will by comparison all 
seem tame and colorless. There is only one way by which he 
can avoid a jarring anti-climax. That is to lay in a proper 
supply of oxygen and condensed foods and take airship for 
a tour of the chief INIartian winter resorts. Yes, and there 
is one alternative: Let him take armchair for those wonder- 
lands of the human imagination which alone are more sublimely 
fair than the irised mountain range that God inverted in the 
heart of Arizona. 



IX 
THE CREOLE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS 

TRAVELERS are urged to "see Naples and die." 
"See the Grand Canyon and die," would be more 
warrantable advice. But if the pilgrim refuses to 
die after seeing the Grand Canyon, and stubbornly 
insists on going elsewhere, his best chance of dodging disap- 
pointment is to find some complete contrast. Let him keep on 
along the southern boundary of the States until he comes to 
New Orleans. He will thus exchange a primeval American 
solitude for a quaint foreign civilization, a god-like solemnity 
and calm for a humorous excitability, a desert for a garden. 

But when the carnival is reaching out eager hands toward the 
goal of ^Mardi Gras; when the venerable city of the Creoles 
is administering stimulants to its exhausted costumers; when 
hordes of strangers, to the seventh jiart of a million swarm 
through the crescent streets — this is no season in which to en- 
joy the mellow Spanish and French romance of New Orleans. 
Rather let the pilgrim choose the long, quiet days of reaction 
from the mad business, when the city sinks into the role of the 
Sleeping Beaut}'. These are the days which, for his purposes, 
the seeker for romantic America will find ideal. 

He would do Avell, though, to come in time for jNIardi Gras. 
Not that he will find anything j^articularly worth-while in the 
far-famed float parades of Proteus or Rex or Comus and liis 
Mystic Krewe. For these parades have, in the course of the 
years, become somewhat stereotyped and unimaginative, and in 
our day have all too much to learn from the budding art of 
modern pageantry. Instead, the chief interest and charm of 
^lardi Gras to-day lies in its unofficial attractions — in the 

949 



250 ROMANTIC AMERICA \ 

gaiety, brilliance and good tenipe'* of the private maskers and I 
the resourceful wit sliown in their costumes and their acting. 

At the last celebration the costumes were amazing in their I 
variety. It would almost be safe to hazard the assertion that ' 
the birthday suit was the only possible costume left unrepre- j 
sented in Canal Street on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. 
To catch a vision of the scene one has only to turn his fancy 
quite loose. One rubbed shoulders with Vikings, Visigoths I 
and vampires. A bacchanal and a necromancer out of the 
pitch-dark ages led in chains a rhinoceros who minced like a 
dancing bear and elegantly tipj^ed liis horn to a group of de- 
lighted northern girls with clicking kodaks. There were hun- 
dreds of tramps and Pierretes and JMarcehnes and Aryan 
darkeys. A detachment of skeletons, conducted by their phys- 
ical director, Beelzebub, performed a dance of death about 
President Taft who gallantly bore upon his arm the little fairy 
Picklekin. A much be-jeweled octopus made way with pluto- 
cratic hauteur for a caricature of an automobile,- — a ram- 
shackle buggy containing a bale of hay and a tin can marked 
Gasoline, and with a moth-eaten mule propelling the organism 
from the rear. 

Some of the unofficial parades were highly entertaining, par- 
ticularly one that set forth the local street characters: the rat- 
catcher, clothes prop seller, chimney sweep, tinner, glazier, 
whitewasher and laundress, the kindling wood man with his 
bundle of pitch pine, and the functionary who makes mat- 
tresses of Sjianish moss. 

Despite the exuberant gaietj'^ of the vast crowd, its enjoy- 
ment was tempered with a courtly self-restraint and courtesy. 
"Thanks cost nothing," says a Creole proverb. But even if 
their cost were to vie WMth that of living, I doubt whether polite- 
ness and gentleness would vanish out of Mardi Gras. Though 
many of the girls' costumes were progressive, not to say radical, 
one noticed scarcely any chaffing or flirting. There was abso- 
lutely no trace of the crude "horse-play" that defaces the 



11 







Dl.CAVI-.l) MAdMMCI'.NCl. IN lOlLorSK SlKKl;! 



THE CREOLE CITY 253 

streets of Manhattan on Election nights; for another Creole 
proverb asserts that "by talking too loud the jaw becomes 
swelled." Most of the time the huge assembly beneath my 
balcony made no more noise than if a congregation were mov- 
ing slowly out of the nave of a cathedral after service. Indeed, 
in a side street I saw a single officer arrest four gay young 
blades. And the whole incident was conducted as decorously 
as a funeral. This genial public decorum is the thing that 
makes jNIardi Gras preeminently the children's daj'. I know of 
no other throng anywhere in which they could wander so safe, 
so artless and so unafraid. And one of my most vivid recollec- 
tions is of a ballet girl in pink who might have learned to walk 
jierhaps five or six months before this, her debut. . . . 

Another good reason for not missing JNIardi Gras is that one 
appreciates the place so much more keenly if he can first man- 
age to form some idea, however sketchy, of the Creoles them- 
selves. Carnival is a good time for character study. And 
before many days of it one begins to understand that these de- 
scendants of the original French settlers present a strange but 
attractive medley of widely varied qualities. 

The Creole is instinct with that finer sort of politeness which 
is imbued with imagination. Even if the other is only an ani- 
mal, he can put himself in the other's jjlace. " Tout macaque 
trouve so piti jolt" he is fond of saj-ing in his curious French 
dialect. "Every monkey thinks its young one pretty." 

During my first prowl through the Old French Quarter I 
found a ragged man cleaning a stove in a junk j'ard. He 
gave me one glance, seemed immediately to divine my secret 
love of the picturesque, stopped work, accompanied me to the 
street, and with the most finished courtesy, pointed out all the 
noteworthy courtyards within a radius of three squares. In 
the weeks that followed, whenever I entered that charmed 
region between Canal Street, Esplanade Avenue. Ramimrt 
Street and the river, I was destined to meet with much the same 
sort of treatment. 



254> ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

The Creole is extravagantly proud and a little boastful. 
He is also somewliat confiding. In the first of the courtyards 
pointed out by my friend the stove cleaner, an old woman told 
me in the first five minutes her age, that of her three grand- 
children, informed me that she was now, since two days, a great 
grandmother, and got well launched on her autobiography. 

The Creole is easy going. It is refreshing to find a citizen 
of these States so free from the dollar-snatching instinct, so 
full of that spirit of dolce far niente which prevails in the far 
lotus-land along the bay of Naples. INIany of his pithiest say- 
ings are arguments directed against the pursuit of the strenu- 
ous life. For instance: "The cat's tail takes time to grow," 
and "Threatened war does n't kill many soldiers," and "If the 
sea were to boil the fishes would be cooked" — and spoil presum- 
ably before they could all be served at those leisurely eleven 
o'clock breakfasts for wliich New Orleans is justly famous. 
But it must also be remembered that the Creole is just as ex- 
citable as he is easy-going; just as impulsive in some ways as he 
is self-restrained in others. Tliis is one of the things which 
make liis subdued behavior en masse so remarkable. 

He has a fund of original humor. "]Must n't tie up the 
hound with a string of sausages," he will say with one of his 
inimitable Gallic gestures: or, "The mosquito loses his time 
when he tries to sting the alligator." jNIore often than not, 
his face wears a broad smile. But when it does not one gener- 
ally reads there the accumulated pathos of long years of racial 
misfortune. In his eyes effervescent gaiety plays hide and 
seek with a gentle, resigned sadness. 

The Creole delights almost equally in the privacy that is 
typified by his mysterious, retired courtyards, and in the pub- 
licity involved in his carnivals. In the most winning way he 
combines frugality for himself with quixotic generosity toward 
otliers. Wliichever language he uses has a leaning toward 
some other language. His French is the despair of the Paris- 
ian and his English is an exotic pleasure to American ears. At 



THE CREOLE CITY 257 

my Creole boarding house all the regular patrons spoke with 
a strong agreeable Gallic accent somewhat in this fashion: 
"Ah, what pite! JNIadame Dumaine ees not fo lonch. IMiche 
IMarigny ees not fo lonch. We sail be leedle crowd. . . . 
Wall you know, seh, since years we don't have at table so few 
as this." And my favorite waiter at the incomparable res- 
taurant kno^vn as "Antoine's" shook hands most kindly at part- 
ing and wished me "bon voyage e good chan<:e e good lucks!" 

New Orleans has often been called "Our Little Paris." 
And, indeed, the art of life seems to be practised here with as 
much gusto and as little friction as in the mother city. In 
physical appearance, though, in its wealth of stately old man- 
sions and glamourous courtyards somewhat fallen from the 
splendor of their prime, the place reminds me more perhaps of 
the Teuton's "Little Paris," Leipzig. But it has this advan- 
tage over all other Parises whatever : it belongs to the far south. 
It is often slanderously asserted that this city, outside of the 
vieiix carre de la ville — the old French Quarter, is much like 
any other American citJ^ One glance at the globe will reveal 
how false any such statement must be. For New Orleans is 
in the latitude of Shanghai and Llasa and Cairo. And slaves 
who were, in former days, transported there from southern Mo- 
rocco could actually continue their lives along the old meridian 
lines. 

Every part of the city is filled with southern charm. Mile 
after mile the gracious curves of broad, heavily shaded avenues 
are lined with the high-pillared fronts of mansions that seem 
like editions de luxe of the old time plantation houses. Vines 
clothe the houses and overrun the minaret-like cisterns. Huge 
live oaks preside at the corners of the grounds. And nearer 
the walls, interspersed with oranges, figs and a myriad flower- 
ing shnibs, the magnolias wave their glossy, mysterious foliage 
and their fragrant blossoms. 

At the same time it cannot be denied that the Old French 



258 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Quarter is by far the most fascinating part of New Orleans. 
So strongly does it contrast with its surroundings that crossing 
Canal Street is a good deal like crossing some national frontier. 
You leave America and breathe the atmosphere of a stranger, 
warmer France with a whiff of Spain thrown in and a faint 
aroma of our own West Indies. The streets and houses grow 
small and quaint, their fronts enlivened with a profusion of 
iron lace and offering here and there, within archway or gate 
of battered green wood, glimpses of alluring courtyards. 

Somehow or other, the sidewalks are now no longer side- 
walks, but banquettes. You discover, here a wall of adobe, 
there a mysteriously beautiful grating in a wall, or a piece of 
rusted filigree still adhering to a stately ruin of a gate which 
gives on barrenness and destruction. Here is a lime-washed 
stucco facade with jalousies and small-paned windows of aged 
iridescent glass. There is a mulatto maiden scrubl)ing her 
front doorstep to a golden glow with powdered yellow ochre. 
And next door a mammy at similar devotions is making her 
step blush with clean brick dust. Here flow the lines of a 
lordly porte cochere, there sags a roof of weed-gro^Mi tiles 
straight out of the Spanish regime and the works of George 
W. Cable. It is abundantly evident everywhere how ardently 
the Creole loves arches and heavy pillars, and the sorts of shut- 
tered and latticed "galleries" that are dear to Bermuda and 
San Domingo. 

Suddenly you feel that an atmosphere like this must have 
alchemic power over human nature. The very Yankee tour- 
ists whom by chance you meet have abated something of their 
Yankeedom. You yourself are different. With his kodak- 
like pen Lynn Tew Spragvie has caught the thing that makes 
this difference. "The boastful, quixotic, polite, generous, 
fearless, hospitable, pleasure-loving, ever-youthful spirit of the 
old town has affected her American foster-claildren and given 
life a peculiar cast. Street life, always so naive and uncon- 
scious, is stamped with character there. . . . The indolently 




I l> M;1 N( II l..| AKl IK A 1 ^ ru Al. .MUl.l.l 



II 



THE CREOLE CITY 261 

graceful men with black pointed beard, whose attire is in the 
mode of a decade gone, the pretty girls with enslaving eyes 
whose glances are so discretely between modesty and coyness; 
the lazy negroes filled with thai pure animal gladness that is 
never completely attained by whites, sleeping on their two- 
wheeled carts; the gentle and impecunious old ladies selling 
sweets and flowers at little stands ; the old cemeteries where the 
dead are laid away above ground in oven-like vaults ; the death 
notices tacked on posts; the glimpses into palm-planted courts 
hung about with curious galleries, as the ample balconies are 
called down there ; the solid shutters ; the bells on gates instead 
of doors; the posters tacked up everywhere, announcing every 
variety of public amusement; the open, too odorous gutters; 
the flowering vines climbing decaying walls." 

This new and alien hfe is exemplified, as well, by the milk- 
women, perched high in their glittering little carts ; by the semi- 
public cooks hastening about the streets with hot meals in lay- 
ered tins which they deliver twice a day by contract for a dollar 
a head a week; by the lagniappe, or small tip in kind, which the 
shopkeeper bestows upon the purchaser ; by the negress^s, chat- 
tering their outlandish patois in doorways or walking with the 
upright carriage of Tanagra figures under great burdens. 
And their color schemes! I remember one jet black mammy 
on Daiiphine Street whose blue skirt and vermilion, gold- 
figured blouse expostulated with a purple neckerchief and an 
emerald turban. Loudest of all, on toj) of the basket of wash 
which was balanced on her head, shrieked an incandescent pink 
comforter. 

The beauty lover would do well in his prowlings to adopt the 
European traveler's custom of going into every courtyard 
whose entrance stands open, and advancing until stopped. 
Indeed, an ingenious contributor to The Craftsman advises 
one to ring at every attractive looking closed gate, and when 
the inentable mammy opens it, to inquire boklly if this is not 
the house Where Xapoleon stayed. Whereupon she will court- 



262 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

eously invite one in, explaining that she cannot keep track of 
all the many who come and go, but the name sounds familiar, 
and no doubt he of whom the gemmun spoke has often stayed 
there. Thus one is sure to make many worth-while discoveries 
and to have almost as exciting a time as if he were court-hunt- 
ing in Nuremberg instead, or Mont San Michel or the Latin 
Quarter or old Brunswick. 

]\Iy exploration of the Old French Quarter began with the 
interminable deserted reaches of the Hotel Royal, This 
building had dominated the city's life for decades, had been 
State capital, and had withstood more than one siege. It com- 
municated as sharp an impression of the violent decay of mag- 
nificence as I had ever received outside of the pages of Poe. 
My guide was a decrepit crone and she fitted well into the pic- 
ture as she pointed in a moldy register to the signature of Ellen 
Terry. In the rotunda was shown the slave block where 
human "goods" had been auctioned off, and then the horrible 
hole which purported to be the old slave prison. "Say," ex- 
claimed a young tourist from IMobile who had joined us, "but 
it sure was hell to be a nigger in them daj-s !" Nor did it de- 
tract from the horror to find out later on that this so-called 
slave prison was in reality only the sleeping quarters of the 
colored helj) before the war. 

It was a refresliment after this to stand in Toulouse Street 
where a couple of stone lions glared at each other across a gate. 
One of them looked down between endless balconies of iron 
lace to a single tall mast that rose from the INIississippi and 
completed the vista. The otlier lion gazed up-street where 
stretched more balconies no less beautiful, leading to the Old 
Basin of the Carondelet Canal. There charcoal boats, sand 
barges and oyster luggers sent up a forest of masts. And 
the tangled cordage was somehow reminiscent of the Spanish 
moss entwined in the branches of the famous duelling oaks in 
City Park. 

Buys and Sells Everything. Thus said a sign on 



1 



J 



THE CREOLE CITY 263 

a shanty near the lions. It struck a harmonious note in 
betraying the same vivid Creole imagination that had com- 
posed the street pictures. It did not take long to discover that 
the signs of New Orleans are thoroughly in character. One 
saloon proprietor has been fancifully truthful enough to call 
his place of business Dreamland. And as for the street names, 
they seem always to have some new sensation in store for the 
stranger. There are streets named for each of the nine muses, 
the three graces and Venus their mistress. There are highly 
foreign sounding names like Dauphine, Tchoupitoulas and 
Iberville. There are streets named in honor of the good things 
of life like Pleasure, Abundance, Piety, Law, Treasure, Vir- 
tue, Love and Duels. And there is even a Street of Good 
Children. Perhaps these streets are truthfully self-descriptive. 
But I know of one that is not. It is called Elysian Fields. 
On asking a Creole policeman where the Elysian Fields were 
he directed me, "oveh j'ondeh, seh, w'ere you see dem box-cars." 
And the sordidness of the Fields reminded me of miserable 
Croesus Alley in Pittsburgh. 

On Royal Street not far from St. Peter Street I found the 
best-known courtyard — the one etched by jNIr. Horter, with 
the battered old fountain, backed by a thick gro^vth of bananas, 
and Avith ivy mantled walls leading to where half a dozen fine 
fan-lights gave on the still enclosure. I used to go back and 
linger there in a sort of day-dream, imagining how the place 
would be later in the season, all fragrant and aglow with the 
blooms peculiar to such retreats: with jasmine, oleander, 
poppy, petunia and periwinkle, with snapdragon. Grand Duke 
and amethyst plant, larkspur, lobelia, sweet elyssum and Span- 
ish bayonet, and with that Sweet Basil and the plant called 
"Guinea Pig" which are supposed by the superstitious Creoles 
to bring fortune, health and reciprocated love. 

From a balcony in the rear of 1014 Royal Street I chanced 
upon a view in which many of the most characteristic features 
of these courtyards were compressed into the compass of a 



264 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

thumb-nail vignette. Over a crumbling brick wall there 
showed an embrasure in a neighboring terrace. Cacti sprouted 
from it. On a rude arbor above it a thick vine rambled. 
There were two of the splendid fan-lights without which no 
such picture is complete. And a dormer drew into one har- 
mony all sorts of irregular wall and chimney-hnes and gabled 
chimney-pots. 

Then came The Haunted House. Here lived the aristo- 
cratic family of Lalaurie, who entertained Lafayette in 1825. 
Nine years later the house caught fire and the firemen, break- 
ing into the upper story, found seven slaves all starving and 
shockingly mutilated. They themselves had started the fire 
to end their miseries. Various instruments of torture, such 
as iron collars with sharp edges, were lying about. Mme. La- 
laurie, it appeared, had taken up slave-torture as her hobby. 
A mob gathered to lynch her, but she escaped to Paris. There 
she was ostracized, but devoted herself to chaiity and ended as 
romantically as she had begun. For she was killed by a wild 
boar during a hunt at Versailles. After the fire and the mob 
had finished with her house it was rebuilt. But it never after- 
wards prospered. Men said that it was haunted by the ghosts 
of the many slaves the lady had nuirdered. Slowly, surely it 
declined through all degrees of the social scale, until it is to-day 
a cheap boarding house and saloon. 

Whatever old New Orleans might have been called, it could 
never, certainly, have been called a gentle place. In Chartres 
Street, little more than a block from the Haunted House, some 
barracks were built to receive the garrison of Fort Diupesne 
when it was driven from the site of Pittsburgh and came down 
the river in flat-boats. And in the barracks yard, little more 
than a century and a half ago, two men were broken on the 
wheel, and another was nailed alive in his coffin and then sawn 
in pieces, coffin and all. 

The Creole city, however, always mitigates past horrors 
with present beauties. Nearby, at 1015 Chartres Street is a 







A CREOLE KITCHEN 



/ll 



THE CREOLE CITY 267 

charming enclosure where it is possible to stand on a high gal- 
lery at the rear and look through the branches of a fig tree into 
a brick-paved court with lofty walls supporting sheets of ivy 
and all sorts of oddly shaped structures. The building at the 
street end wears like a jewel a half round tower with verdi- 
grised cupola. This tower is pierced half way up by a large 
window. And past this the eager life of the street flows 
ceaselessly, bringing to the scene just the ideal element of 
diversity. The old Italian proprietress told me that it was 
much like her old home near the house where Virgil died in 
Brindisi, and that she took untold satisfaction in the resem- 
blance. 

Presently came the site of a notorious blacksmith shop. It 
had been kept a century ago by Lafitte, the last pirate to ply 
his profession in the Gulf of Mexico. Then Jackson Square 
appeared, — the old Place d' Amies, its long flanking Pontalba 
buildings gracefully balconied with iron filigree. In the center 
ramped the equestrian statue of Old Hickory, surrounded by 
strange southern foliage and the play of excited, sallow-faced 
children. Opposite the river was the cathedral with the squat 
Cabildo by its side. And it came to mind that Cable had once 
likened them to Don Quixote squired by Sancho. It was 
squired, indeed by two Sanchos for the Presbytery on the other 
side looked like the Cabildo's twin brother. 

Around this square w^as the nucleus of the original settle- 
ment by Bienville, the city's founder, and the place has re- 
mained the real heart of Xew Orleans. It has seen waving 
above it in turn the French, Spanish, French and American 
colors. It has seen the various nations make love, fight duels, 
sell slaves and put violent ends, in various ingenious ways, to 
criminals and traitors. It has seen how sugar and cotton can 
enrich a great river port, and how steam and civil war can i)ull 
it down. But it has never seen its beloved Creoles abandoning 
the good old customs of the poetic days of their prime. 

xVt Chartres and St. Louis Streets, opposite the large house 



268 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

built for Napoleon I by Girod — who was sure he could rescue 
the ex-emperor from St. Helena — stands an old slave market. 
This, I reflected, may have been the verj' spot where the iron 
of slavery entered into Lincoln's soul. For when he was not 
much more than a lad, tradition says that he guided a flat-boat 
down the Mississippi from Illinois to New Orleans, and visited 
a slave auction. A comely young mulatto girl was up for sale 
and the prospective bidders were pinching her flesh and making 
her trot up and down like a horse to show off her gait. As 
Lincoln watched the scene pity, loathing and unconquerable 
hate strove in his face for the mastery. Turning to his com- 
panions he said : "Let 's get away from this." He made a 
\'igorous sweep of his lank arm as if to indicate the whole insti- 
tution of slavery. "Boys," he exclaimed, "if I ever get a 
chance to hit this thing I '11 liit it hard!" 

Prick the Old French Quarter almost anywhere and it bleeds 
romance. On the side of it farthest from the river, is a street 
named after the ramjiarts that actually disported themselves 
there as late as 1820. To-day, instead of ramparts, a double 
line of live oaks runs along between charmingly arabesqued 
balconies and old mansions that boast fluted Doric columns two 
stories high and hints of imibrageous gardens behind them. 

Presently it brings one to a little park called Beauregard, or 
Congo Square, which once was known as the Place des Negres. 
Here on Sunday evenings the slaves used to dance the Calinda 
and the Bamboula with much barbaric drumming of mules' 
jaw-bones on a cask and braying of wooden horns and rattling 
of metal anklets, to remind them of the old folks at home in the 
African jungle. There is, in The Grandissimes, a spirited de- 
scription of these dancers: "They gyrated in couples, a few at 
a time, throwing their bodies into the most startling attitudes 
and the wildest contortions, while the whole company of black 
lookers-on, incited by the tones of the weird music and the vio- 
lent posturing of the dancers, swayed and writhed in passionate 




IIIL FKliNCll MAKKliT 



Il 



THE CREOLE CITY 271 

sympathy, beating their breasts, palms and thighs in time with 
the bones and drums, and at frequent intervals lifting, in that 
wild African unison no more to be described than forgotten, the 
unutterable songs of the Babouille and Counjaille dances, with 
their ejaculatory burdens of 'Aie! Aie! Voudou Magnan!" 
and 'Aie Calinda! Dance Calinda!' The volume of sound 
rose and fell with the augmentation or diminution of the dan- 
cers' extravagances. Now a fresh man, young and supple, 
bounding into the ring, revived the flagging rattlers, drummers 
and trumpeters; now a wearied dancer, finding his strength 
going, gathered all his force at the cry of 'Dance zisqu'a mort!' 
rallied to a grand finale and with one magnificent antic, fell, 
foaming at the mouth." This square it was that provided 
headquarters for the rites of Yoodooism, that ancient, dusky 
religion of mysten,' and terror which, by way of Hayti, was 
brought from Africa. 



'o* 



The cemeteries of New Orleans are unique. For, on ac- 
count of the moist soil the dead are buried in monuments or in 
raised brick tiers of round-arched niches known as "ovens." 
The epitaphs are usually in French and are sometimes so quaint 
as to bring a smile to Anglo-Saxon eyes. In the cemetery 
known as Lafayette Number One, under a line of magnificent 
magnolias where thousands of birds live in a state of chronic 
joy-madness, one inscription states, to the best of my remem- 
brance, that here lie five infants with the regrets of their 
parents. 

Parts of the older burying grounds, their monuments mossed, 
ruinously falling together and covered with wild flowers and 
weeds, are like the resting places of heroes of dim, European 
antiquity. While certain walls, filled with neglected dead — 
especially at dusk under the heavy shade of the magnolias, or 
by moonlight, call to mind the catacombs of Rome or Syracuse. 

In St. I^ouis Cemetery Number Two I came upon a sight 
that brought the catacombs with their grisly displays still more 



272 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

vividly to mind. This sight was the open tomb of a good old 
French family. There they all lay together, their skulls and 
bones embracing one another and inextricably commingled. A 
young mulatto was looking in with mild curiosity, and I heard 
him comment to liis companion: "Must be most a dollah's 
wTjth o' bones in yare." This condition of affairs appeared to 
be nothing very uncommon. For oven after oven stood open 
displaying its contents to the idle or the shuddering gaze. 

The older cemeterj^ of St. Louis Xumber One, dating from 
1788 was still more romantic and still more neglectful of its 
inhabitants. Looking out between the various tombs and 
monuments to the two churches of Rampart Street, I was de- 
lighted by a constant succession of quaint and often lovely pic- 
tures, encased in engaging Old World frames. But presently 
I stumbled upon one particularly picturesque enclosure which 
was like a slap in the face of civilization. Within a narrow 
radius lay a score of individual graves, gaping wide open and 
with their inmates' bones exposed to view. The skull in one of 
these had been partiallj^ broken up, presumably by souvenir 
hunters, and the marks of the crushed bone were plainly visible 
on the brickbat that had been used as a hammer. The grave- 
stone had likewise been broken, but the last two lines of the 
epitaph were still there. They ran; 

"Triumphant o'er death by his redeemer's love 
To join his God in the realms of light above." 

While copying this I was hailed by a negress from a balcony 
in the red light district just across the cemetery wall, who 
pledged her word that the spooks would git me there if I did n't 
watch out. To my mind the most distressing thing of all was 
that the grave of Oliver Parmalee should be standing open, 
though his bones had vanished, possibly in the pockets of the 
souvenir hunter. For this patriot, as his tomb still bears wit- 
ness, was one of the handful killed under General Jackson in 
the battle of New Orleans in 1814. 



11 







TIIK •PICAVL'SE TIER" AS IT WAS 




A CEMETI'.KV WALK (luMliS AM) ■OVENS"; 




THE CREOLE CITY 275 

After such an encounter it is relieving to visit the campo 
santo and miracle-working shrine of St. Roch. As j'ou enter 
the holy enclosure you may buy a little leaden figure of the 
saint, the figure of St. Anthony which is sold outside the 
chiu'ch at Padua. And this figure, as surely as that, will guard 
J'OU from disease. Evidently the good saint has been as suc- 
cessful a worker of miracles as many European saints much 
longer establislied in practice. For, in the chapel is a large 
pile of discarded crutches, many of which once belonged to 
children. There is one pitifully short piece of broomstick that 
may have belonged to some negro child. And you are inclined 
to bless the holy Roch more for this one miracle than for curing 
ninety and nine wielders of springed and padded crutches. 
Above this pile hang the usual facsimiles in plaster and wood 
of cured arms and legs, and the heads and bodies of babies. A 
magical hght filters dowTi into the little chapel through what 
look like windows of old stained glass. An open grille does 
duty for a door. And under the roses that arch it the sweet- 
voiced Louisiana birds fly as freely in and out as if this shrine 
had been built by their little brother St. Francis himself. And 
the}' mingle their praises with the whispered ones of a Creole 
mother who kneels before the altar with happy tears in her eyes, 
lighting her votive candles, for the cure, perhaps, of a crippled 
baby. 

The most interesting part of New Orleans' famous levee lay 
near the enthralhng bustle of the French ^Market. It was an 
oyster lugger landing known as the Picaj'une Tier. I lingered 
there long while a crazy old craft known as the New Venus 
discharged her cargo. The oysters were loaded upon the backs 
of negroes who, with empty sacks drawn corner-wise over tlieir 
heads and shoulders, toiled barefooted up the steep, narrow 
plank. In tliis garb they seemed like some strange order of 
monks doing penance for the sins of the race. 

Standing there on the verge of the Father of Waters I had 
a striking view of that quarter moon of river from wliich the 



276 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Crescent City takes its name. There stretched the mighty 
sweep of levee, the black whan^es splashed here and there with 
the white hulls of sugar and cotton and fruit steamers, etched 
with masts and cordage, while beyond the waves Gretna and 
Algiers showed like fairy towns against the misty sky of dawn. 
Flocks of bobbing gulls were being swept swiftly seaward on 
the ebb. A large craft swung down the channel outward 
bound for Honduras and Nicaragua. 

"What is she?" I asked a group of shivering "wharf -rats." 
They shook their heads darkly and allowed that she might well 
be a filibuster full of arms and powder for the revolutionists. 

"Look at them niggers," exclaimed one of them, pointing at 
the New Venus. "Why, a white man who 'd run 'round bare- 
foot like that in this weather 'd be dead in a day. No, seh! 
Nothin' on earth can persuade me that niggers is human!" 

His words woke a contrasting chord of remembrance. In 
imagination I saw Abe Lincoln's flatboat swing into view 
around the bend, and saw its gaunt young pilot make fast to 
that very levee. In fancy I followed him into the to^vn. And 
as I stood there in the slave market watching the fierce light of 
Emancipation dawn in his eyes, it seemed poetically right that 
this romantic impulse should have known its first thriU amid 
the romance of Creole New Orleans. 



1 



X 

THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 

ABOUT the time that the pilgrim has said good-by to 
New Orleans and its last engaging Creole he begins 
to feel unaccountably fagged. If he is a person of 
discernment he will realize that the exhaustins won- 
derlands of the far west have now sent in their bill, that he will 
have to settle up by settling down to a good rest, and that there 
is no better resting place than the State of Elaine. 
Sometimes I am glad that the bard who sang 

"Oh, East is East and West is West" 

sang true. After a round of Yellowstones, Yosemites, Grand 
Canyons and the like, one turns with something akin to relief, 
from their exotic freaks, beauties and grandeurs to recuperate 
on the normal shores and in the normal woods of "Way Down 
East"! The western wonderlands are too wonderful to wear 
well. But Maine wears well because it combines, in not over- 
powering measure, most of the natural features which the heart 
of man may, in moderation, desire to live with day by day. In- 
stead of half-mile Cahfomia waterfalls, there are trout-filled, 
game-lined rivers dashing down through hundreds of miles of 
unbroken forest and offering few dull moments to the wielder 
of paddle and setting-jjole. Instead of god-like, inaccessible 
Cordilleras there are the most friendly, human, engaging of 
mountains, whose beauties are 

"not too brijiht or good 
For human nature's daily food. " 
279 



280 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Many westerners would, I suppose, shoot out the lip and call 
these mountains "ant-hills. But they are lofty enough for the 
vacation exercise of a tired man. And, moreover, they have 
distinction. For the place ■ 

Where leap from the foam-blossomed plain 
The island-mountains of Maine 

is the one place on our Atlantic coast where nature combines 
her two chief inspirations, the mountains and the sea. 

Instead of the geysers, paint pots, mud volcanoes and glass 
cliffs of Wyoming, there are quaint, lovely harbors and islands 
without end. Instead of stage drivers with their outfit of 
cammed jokes, INIaine is almost sure to furnish the answerer to 
the call of the wild v,n\h an interesting and really human com- 
panion,— »^a chip of the old block of Katahdin. Instead of mile- 
deep gorges of sublime loneliness there is a stateful of the sort 
of forest and shore where it is hard to feel lonelj- though alone, 
and where each native is likely to be worth your study and en- 
joj'ment. 

The wonderlands are not strong on the human side. There 
you stand in the presence of an angry, a benignant or a capri- 
cious God, and — only too often — in the presence, as well, of a 
throng of rather unideally selected fellow trippers. Here you 
may always have the most resourceful and entertaining of Yan- 
kees to bear you company. And if there is such a thing as a 
fellow tripper Way Down East, I have yet to see him. 

The Maine coast has a character sharply distinguished from 
the duller, more blandly sandy rims of the other Atlantic 
States. Indeed, among the shores of the seven seas, with one 
exception, I know of no other coastful of rocks and rock-pools 
so colorful, so fascinatingly molded, so ready with poetic sug- 
gestion; no other coastful of sand and seaweed so fragrant; of 
caves so filled with ocean anemones and echoes from "old Tri- 
ton's wreathed horn" ; of headlands at once so bluff and so gra- 
cious; of bays and harbors so intimate yet so drenched in the 



I 



I 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 283 

spirit of the watery wilds outside; of vegetation so vivid and 
quick with superabounding life and odorous Avith the aromatic 
essence of the deep woods beyond. When it comes to such 
thhigs there is for me but one rivaling shore, — that of the Pa- 
cific near JVIonterey. And even in this case it is hard to decide 
just how much of its allurement is due to the place itself and 
how much to the poetry of ]Mr. George Sterling, its chief cele- 
brant. 

One thing is sure. The mid-California coast, though it may 
be as grateful to eye and ear as INIaine's, lacks the snap of the 
way-down Eastei'n atmosphere. Its languors tend to lull you 
in lotus-land. But Maine shoots your veins through and 
through with such carbonated extract of elixir of life that — if 
you are a writer, for example — you feel Hke penning each day's 
inspirations in red letters only. 

For seeing Way Down East properly you need a touch of 
the vagabond spirit — the same spirit which informed that rol- 
licking verse of Bliss Carman's about 

"Tramping down the roads of Maine" 

and prompted his other one concerning 

"A vagrant's morning wide and blue, 
In early fall when the wind walks, too; 
A shadowy highway cool and brown. 
Alluring up and enticing down. . . . 
An open hand, an easy shoe, 
And a hope to make the day go through." 

This vagabond frame of mind is the key to the tnie secret of 
Maine's harbors and islands. As for the interior, it is no 
lietter than so much cord-wood unless approached in the spirit 
that informed Whitman when he sang: 

"Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road." 

In this informal manner I had often taken to the open tote- 
road of the Iklaine woods and had found it the ideal mode of 



284 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

travel. Last fall I tried Vagabondia's formula on the open 
road — and roadstead — of the coast, and found it no less effica- 
cious. Lightheartedness, like the mantle of good old Walt, 
descended upon me as soon as I left Portsmouth definitely be- 
hind. And when York Village was reached, I had so far 
shaken off life's pedantries that I never dreamed of protesting 
when an old Yorker informed me that, "York, sir, was the first 
city in America." 

I lunched upon a ham sandwich and upon the sweetness of 
the churchyard, while flat on my back among venerable lichened 
slabs, shaded by ample trees, surrounded by houses of the olden 
time, confronted by a colonial meeting house. For dessert 
there were epitaphs fresh picked from headstones that reached 
back into the seventeenth century. But the later ones grew 
more interesting. On the grave of a young wife who died in 
1774 I noticed a naively ambitious attempt at portraiture in 
relief, with a touching epitaph composed by her husband, ^Ir. 
Samuel Nasson, and closing: 

"When death shall stop my breath; 
And end my Time; 
God grant: my Dust 
May mingle then with tliine." 

But I searched in vain for IMr. Samuel's grave, and wondered 
whether the War of Independence, breaking out two years 
later, had claimed him and frustrated his wish. 

Later that day I discovered in the venerable Jail nearby, the 
very sheet of paper that may have lured him to a soldier's 
grave. It was a recruiting advertisement, and it drew almost 
as glowing a picture of the martial life as ]\Ir. Reuterdahl 
draws for Uncle Sam to-day. The old poster calls upon "all 
brave, healthy, able-bodied, and well-disposed young men" to 
join the troops now raising under General Washington. It 
lures the ambitious youth to "embrace this opportunity of 
spending a few happy years in viewing the different parts of 



II 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 287 

this beautiful continent, in the honourable and truly respectable 
character of a soldier, after which he may, if he pleases return 
home to his friends, with his pockets full of money and his 
head covered with laurels. 

God Save the United States'' 
It was the idea of ]Mr. William Dean Howells, who spends 
his summers at York, to preser^^e tliis old Jail, which dates 
from 1653, and turn it into a colonial museum. The wooden 
exterior is curiously patched with stone where the dungeon 
used to be, and the interior is quite encmsted with the romance 
of other days. 

Among aU the museum's exhibits, a human document known 
as Trickey's Bible interested me most. Now Trickey, despite 
the many misrepresentations of his hfe, character and strange 
fate, was a sort of pirate-poacher-hermit-wizard who in the 
eighteenth century, lived in a hut on a nearby shore. And this 
is what stands on the fly-leaf of his Bible: 

William Trickey was born 
Augest S^'e 1770 

William Trickey his Book 
god giv him grace ther in to look 
and when the beell 
doth for him tol the 
lord of heven rcev his Soul 

Despite the wishes of his pious mother, however, Trickey 
did not receive from on high any too much grace. He early 
became the terror of the neighborhood, and his almost feline 
hold on life long defied death in every form. Once his boat 
capsized, and as it came floating in bottom up, a joyful shout 
ran up and down the beach, "Trickey 's drowned!" But alas! 
when the boat was righted, there was Trickey, hale and hearty. 
He had crawled up under the thwarts out of harm's way. 
And a general groan ran up and dowTi the beach. "Trickey 
ain't drowned after all !" 



288 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Nothing was too bad to impute to this outlaw. He even 
grew to be regarded as a sort of male witch, and was said to 
subject the cattle of the neighborhood to malicious animal mag- 
netism. At length, to the glad surprise of every one, he suf- 
fered "a sudden and mysterious death," whereupon Ins ghost 
underwent the curious old ceremony of being "laid" at the 
hands of the local minister,— hands, by the way, that were en- 
cased, according to formula, in white gloves. The parson pro- 
nounced an ancient rigamarole over Trickey's corpse and de- 
creed that, for his sins, he would be obliged to bind sand with 
a rope for a thousand years. This rope was supposedly 
brought to hhn from afar by the hands of hurricanes. And 
so strong is local tradition that to this day the folk of York will 
sometimes declare to one another: "They 's sure going to be 
a storm. Last night I heard Trickey callin' for ISIore 
Ro-o-o-pe! :More Ro-o-o-pe!" 

From York the open road led me to Long Beach,— which is 
almost as smooth and gradual and firmly packed as any beach 
that Florida can boast; and through Ogunquit where painters 
abound, on to where Kennebunkport made me linger with the 
narrowness and irregularity of heavily shaded streets, with 
massy pillars of church and colonial mansions gleaming 
through the foliage from unexpected quarters, and with 
dreamy marshlands through Avhich the river meandered. 

The village still seemed to justify what Samuel Adams 
Drake once said about its amphibious character. I too saw "a 
horse hitched at the front and a wherry at the back of the 
shops," which made it possible "for a shopkeeper to sail up to 
liis door, as in Venice, or go a-fishing out of his back windows, 
as in Holland." Above the roofs rose three or four square 
towers, curious Puritan echoes of the Italian campanile. 
These,'l was informed, were lookout towers, built by ship own- 
ers in 'the dim days of the port's prosperity. There aloft the 
owners would sit, like merchants of Venice, and watch the 
offing for the return of their "argosies with portly sail." 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 291 

Through the charming city of Portland, past the birthjihice 
of Longfellow, I hurried. I hurried because cities usually 
close the open road of Vagabondia with the sign. Danger- 
ous Passing, and weigh down the light hearts thereof. But 
a wistful glance was sent out towards Casco Bay where 
!Miss Boxy and Captain Kettridge once immortalized Orr's 
Island. For long ago in that bay I had passed some halcyon 
weeks of abandonment to poetry and had found sea-level there 
much nearer heaven than the physical geographers are ready to 
admit. 

Bath — so called perhaps because American shipping took its 
first bath there — was shown me by one of its best informed and 
most venerable citizens. Through the furious bustle of the 
shipyards he led, to point out the first store ever built in Bath, a 
curious brick affair with recessed windows. It sat far from 
the street, a relic of the days before streets were the fashion, 
when all Bath came and went on the river. A row of old 
houses on Washington Street faced the water, brave with fan- 
light portals, massive chimneys, roof balustrades, and Avith 
flights of stone steps leading down to the street. Now and 
again my guide would call to mind something about their for- 
mer owners. This house here belonged to a right hearty eater. 
He used to put away a sucking pig at a meal. And this one 
on the corner of Russell St. belonged to a shijj-builder who was 
great on the good, strict, old-fashioned ways. It was the cus- 
tom in the ship-yards to work with the feet bare through the 
warm months. And old Abner Townsend once walked home 
barefoot through three miles of snow because it had n't yet 
come the time of year to put on shoes. 

Bath proved to be a place of charming vistas. One was from 
High St. down the precijiitous informality of Walker St. and 
its low stone terrace walls, out under arching elms to the ship- 
yards and islands of the gleaming Kennebec. One was up 
Elm St. from near Front, where all sorts of quaint houses were 
crowned by the cupola of the Baptist church as it bubbled up 



292 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

through the thick leaves. But better still I liked to confront 
the old city hall and look beyond the reticent Yankee pilasters 
and the belfry bell dozing at its wheel to where, above the 
stately houses of the High St., the tlu-ee mellowest churches 
of Bath exhibited respectively an English tower, a Tyrolean 
cupola and a sharp New England steeple in the act of trans- 
fixing a flying fish of gold. 

I loitered about the wharves at Boothbay Harbor and chat- 
ted with the old salts while watching a huge black bowsprit rake 
the heavens above the little white houses, and dwarf the meet- 
ing-house steeple. Though the offmg was hidden by neighbor- 
ing islands, this harbor brought me more of the feel of the 
rough salt ocean, its mystery and strange fascination, than any 
other mainland harbor I had known Way Down East. 

Along the shore were tottering dry-docks, that looked as if 
made especially to hold aloft decrepit vessels— veterans, per- 
haps, of the piping times of 1812— where, as on the tragic 
stage, their sufferings and death might be exhibited to the 
world. And there was no lack of possible actors on such a 
stage. On one side of the harbor proper lay a motley assem- 
blage of condemned hulks in all stages of picturesque desuetude. 
The best of them had not yet lost her erect carriage and stays 
and a suggestion of paint on her cheeks. While the farthest 
gone was a ghastly pulp of shivered timbers that could scarcely 
hold her head above low water. 

The suggestion of Boothbay is all seaward. And while I 
lingered considering a trip to ]Monhegan Island, "the Sentinel 
of New England," a letter from a painter I knew out there 
convinced me that the island lay within the domain of Vaga- 
bondia. "I^Ionhegan," wrote my friend, "is the first place I 've 
seen on this side of the water where the artist conmiunity may 
be said to be really at home in anything like the sense that the 
same is true in Holland or France. I wish you might see a few 
lanky painters manoeuvering with six-foot canvases against the 
sky line. The natives and even the summer people are so used 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 293 

to artists that they never crowd around or show the least curi- 
osity as to what we are doing." In truth I was anxious to see 
a place wliich had so long attracted all schools of landscapists, 
from the stand-pat-ers to the post-post-socialists of art. 

If the pilgrim to JSIonliegan were so nearsighted that he 
could see only a yard before him, even so he would have no 
trouble in making out the colors of the landscape by means of 
the souvenirs which the artists leave scattered over the face 
thereof. On my first walk to the splendid promontory called 
White Head, before looking at the view, I noticed various rags 
upon which modern art had wiped its brushes. Blue and green, 
yellow and gray they were. And, lifting up my eyes, I beheld 
beyond evergreens, yellow sea-weed clasping gray rock and 
rhythmically deluged by a rare blue sea. 

These ]\Ionhegan headlands, though not actually as high as 
those of jMount Desert, seemed distinctly higher and more im- 
pressive. This may be because they are colored more uni- 
formly and somberly and because of this smaller island's isola- 
tion and comparative barrenness. The painters do not call it 
"barrenness," however; they call it "simplicity." And for its 
striking simplicity they love it. Here nature has laid on her 
colors with elemental largeness. There is nothing nervous or 
"piddling" in the way she paints the sweeps of dark bluish 
spruces inland, the velvet old-gold carpets of grasses that as- 
cend thence in large smooth swells over White Head and Burnt 
Head; the huge, homogeneous planes of rock and of liquid blue 
and green, dotted perhaps with schooners, each with a burly 
sailor or two clinging aloft on the lookout for mackerel,— and 
the generous expanses of more highly colored sea-weed where 
the two elements meet. Nature seems to have laid all this on 
with calm, deliberate joy; one might almost say, "with brushes 
of comets' hair." And the artist delights to come here and fol- 
low her lead. 

From Monhegan the open roadstead took me to Muscongus. 
I had heard weird things about tliis island. Rumor had often 



294 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

whispered that JSIuscongus, having been omitted by accident 
from the maps of the United States Survey, stood beyond the 
pale of any government, made its own laws, and was all-suf- 
ficient unto itself. I had also been solemnly told that the popu- 
lation had degenerated through inbreeding and was now chiefly 
feeble-minded. But my visit only re-proved the old truism 
that on this coast the fancy is mightier than the fact. The 
only basis for the political myth was the fact that the men of 
]Muscongus, through some disagreement with the neighboring 
mainland town, had not for some years voted for president. 
As for the people, they were a splendid looking collection of 
humanity. They mustered more tall, athletic, liandsome men 
and beautiful, well-built women than I remembered to have 
seen in any other such small ]Maine community. And the 
minds with which I came in contact, though refreshingly orig- 
inal and old-fashioned in expression, showed no signs of feeble- 
ness. Some of their words were new to me. "Oh, say," I 
heard one of the belles of INIuscongus exclaim, " Jimmie cut off 
Jemima's hair to-night close to her head, and she 's just the 
lookingest thing you ever see!" 

On the way from Round Pond to "Scotty" — as the efficient 
natives call Damariscotta — I chanced upon this sign-board 



Keep OF 

THESE 

PREMICE2 



which reminded me that I was entering ^Maine's sign-board 
belt. Not that there are no sign-boards elsewhere. But at 
about this point, as one travels east and north, they begin to be 
more and more entertaining. Near the old castle of Fort Wil- 
liam Henry at Pemaquid is a tombstone that might have been 
ancestor to some of these sign-boards. The epitaph reads: 




TIIK WAl'F.R SIDi:, CASTINli 




MUNHLUAN HAllliOK 



THE OPEN ROAU IN MAINE 297 

"Behold my Dad is gone 
And leaves me here to mourn 
But hope in Christ I have 
That he and I will save." 

This recalls the famous ejiitaph in the town of Lynam: 

"Be she dead? and am she gone? 
And is I left here all alone? 
O cruel Death ! that wast inclined 
To take she 'fore and leave me 'hind." 

Even the very young people of this region seem to have an in- 
stinct for effectiveness in sign language; and if a board is not 
arresting, they are apt to make it so, by a deft turn. A stone's 
throw from the Pemaquid castle where a curious pavement 
was exhumed and protected by a small building labelled: An- 
cient Pavings, the local youth have altered it by one 
master stroke into: Ancient Ravings. The signboard belt 
runs all the way up to Canada. By the time that cen- 
tral jNIaine is reached the placards have assumed a flavor 
rich and rare. Half a day's walk from Patten, a couple of 
years ago, I saw^ a green board in front of a woodmen's road- 
house that held out in red letters the followng lure : 



MOUNTIN 

VIEW. HOUSE. J. D. LONDON 
PARP. SUPPER. NIGHT LODGEN 
AND. BRAKFEST. FOR. 50. CENTS 

MEN. CARRED. TO. PATTEN 



After some study it was decided that the strange expressions 
"Parp." and "Carred" were sign-board belt versions of "pro- 
prietor" and "carried." 

Scrawled in charcoal on the walls of an abandoned lumber 
camp well to the north of Jack London's joint I discovered a 
clironicle of camp events consisting of three inscriptions that 



298 



ROMANTIC AMERICA 



gave with surprising vividness a hint of that combination of 
childhke naivete and elemental ferocity which makes up so 
large a part of the atmosphere of the INIaine woodsman's life: 

Kid Williams and Kid Davis fought on the Landing Jan. 30 
1 Round bough (both?) came, to a standstill 
and all is well 

This man was caught stealing stockings and was hanged 

Feb. 7, 1 red Stripe 
Extending inoto the sky 
just before the sun Rose we 
wandered what it was 

North of here the signs begin to take on a French-Canadian 
flavor. I once found this one at the carry near the foot of 
Long Lake : 



notice 
To Guides and Sportsmans. 
who whiches. to. be. hauld. 
over. Apply, for. 
Paul Charette. at. the. 

DAM 



These signs and wonders, however, have hurried me far in- 
land, whereas my present route lay along the coast to Camden. 
On the sunny morning of my arrival, Camden harbor was white 
with craft, ranging all the >\''ay from dories, through yachts to 
revenue cutters and steamboats. Above the waterside throng 
of sheds, warehouses, lumber yards and the mossy spiles of the 
wharves, the cordage of limiber schooners etched grateful com- 
plexities. The center of the stage was held by a dredge whose 
crane, now and then, would make a majestic and self-impor- 
tant gesture. Across the harbor, with its masts ranging un- 
naturally high into the heavens, a barque lay dry-docked and 
ship-surgeons were laying bare its ribs. Backing the scene 



II 




Slkl 



CAMDKN MAKlKlIt 



II 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 301 

rose the sheer Camden hills. While in the other direction, the 
offing was varied by the beauties of Vinal Haven, Hurricane 
Island and Isle au Haut, while Negro Island peered into the 
harbor entrance with its leafy rocks parted accurately in the 
middle. 

I found a still better viewpoint on Camden's principal street. 
Below me was a small pond. This spread in the immediate 
foreground an unrippled sky-mirror in fine contrast with the 
ruffled surface of the animated harbor below. High over all 
ranged the barque in dry-dock, and seemed to draw about it 
the shipping and whar\'ing into a composition so perfect that 
it might have been placed there with kindly reference to stroll- 
ing etchers. 

After enjoying the well-turned dwellings and churches of 
Belfast, I wandered to Castine, a town whose old houses and 
churches were no less enjoyable, and which offered in addition 
an old rope-walk and one hundred and fifty sign-boards. But 
these sign-boards were no relations to those of "the belt," for 
they were all devoted to imparting the facts of local history in 
capsule form. 

On the site of the vanished Fort Pentagoet, for instance, a 
board diffused the information that this fort used to be "one 
of the largest and most formidable fortifications in the New 
World," and that its story was "the most varied and dramatic 
of any American fortress of its time." There was more human 
interest, though, in a notice that enlivened a modest by-way: 
"Upon these heights in 1692 James Giles — a boy — and an 
EngUshman taken at Casco — held in slavery by IMadocka- 
wando — for attempting to escape were tortured by fire, com- 
pelled to eat their noses and ears — and then burned to death 
at the stake." 

The veteran embankments of Fort George above the town 
had, I found, become protectors of the national game, and the 
Bunker Hill of the golfer. From this gentle eminence there 
was a far ranging view over the island-studded reaches of Pe- 



302 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

iiobscot and Blue Hill Bays. Directly in front loomed Isles- 
boro, the proud possessor of Dark Harbor. Far to the west 
rose the Camden hills. Thirty miles eastward Mount Desert 
sunned its pure lofty profile. And the towli of colonial spires 
and portals slumbered at my feet. 

Even more picturesque than the Castine of brick and clajj- 
board was the Castine of flesh and blood. The town has never 
wanted for "originals," One such married couple — the wife, 
a prodigy of persistency and consistencj', — the man, a unique 
orator — once set forth together in the family dory. AVhile he 
fished and declaimed she tended to her beloved knitting, but 
was so moved by the man's oratory that she fell overboard. 
The man arrived at the scene of action only in time to seize her 
by one portly ankle and to this he clung till help arrived. 
When the good wife was finally pulled out it was noticed M'ith 
amazement that she still grasped her unfinished stocking, and 
that it was perceptibly longer. She had kept on knitting dur- 
ing the whole of her adventure under water ! 

One of her husband's orations will j^robably be long-lived. 
^Vlien the temperance movement was stirring Castine a crowd 
of "the boys" induced him to set forth his view of the question. 
This was the speech: "jSIan, he make boat, he make keel, ribs, 
and seats; then he put oakum in it to make it tight. Well, 
so God, he make man; he make his arms, legs and head; then 
he put whisky in him to make him tight." 

Castine's present "original," Mr. James Webster, is a man 
of ability both as fiddle-maker and poet. There is room here 
for no more than three of the many succulent stanzas of his 
most popular poem: 

"THE CASTINE CONFLAGRATION, 1872 

Most manfully HE stood the test 
And like a HERO done his best; 
But human nature cannot stand 
What is beyond tlie power of man. 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 303 



Mr. NOYES deserves some mention 
For his brave and good attention 
And the counsels he imparted 
To the faint and chicken-hearted. 

The LADIES too, with open hearts, 
Like ANGELS, well they done their parts, — 
With out-spread arms, refreshments free, 
For all the men of Number Three." 

Castine, of course, is not unique in producing queer and 
fascinating characters. Every village, every forest range, 
every insignificant island of JVIaine is fertile ground for their 
growing. And this makes the state a perpetual feast for the 
connoisseur of human nature. There is one thing, though. 
Even if you are a connoisseur you will have to work and wait 
and watch for your pleasures. The Maine "original" is no- 
body's fool. He generally has in him a vein of perversity. 
He is apt to belong to the hard-shell variety of down-easter. 
And do not imagine that you are likely to see anj-thing of his 
real sub-shell personality if you appear hurried or anxious to 
see it, or one whit less careless of time and eternity than he 
himself is. 

The only way to unmute the inglorious Milton of Maine 
is to catch him off his guard. Pretend, for instance, that you 
are about to settle down into his village foi'cver. Then — such 
is his perversity of nature — he will most likely reveal his in- 
most self to you before sun-down. Another good method is 
to let him take you out fisliing on the ocean, or, better still, in 
the woods. There you will notice, if you find favor in his 
eyes, that his reticence is a by product of village civilization, 
and drops from him almost as soon as the white steeple is lost 
to view. 

The first native of Maine who ever took me trout fishing 
exhibited every symptom of feeble-mindedness until the spice 



304 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

of the balsam woods saluted his nostrils. Then, at once he 
began telhng about the last "sport" he had guided, who was 
"homely as a hedge-fence put up by moonlight," and was so 
ornery that "if the devil stole that there Ham Blaine after 
dark he 'd drop him when it cum dayhght." Before our first 
stop he had told me two ways of catching rabbits. By the first 
method, "you take a lot o' salt, mix some pepper with it, strew 
it on a very hard rock, then watch. The rabbits cum and 
eat the salt, and the pepper makes 'em sneeze so vilent, they 
bump their noses on the rock tiU they fall down in a swound 
and you step up and pop 'em in j'our bag." 

The other method was to "build a bustin' fire in the woods 
when the snow is plenty. Now rabbits, you must know, is 
a mite cold blooded little critters, so thej^ '11 cum and set round 
it and warm their toes. Well, pretty soon off they '11 drop 
asleep and the fire '11 melt the snow into slush. And after 
another bit the fire '11 die out and the mornin' '11 cum on sharp 
and 'U freeze the slush into ice and ketch the little critters fast 
by the paws. Then all you have to do is cum round with yer 
ax and chop 'em out." 

When taken off their guard, Maine men and women are 
good improvisers. In driving down the eleven miles' length 
of the island of Islesboro I was sho^vn the house of a certain 
Jolin Smith who was noted for his loud voice. "One day," the 
driver told me, "a stranger called to the house and asked Mrs. 
Smith if John was around. 'I don't know,' answered Mrs. 
Smith, 'he ain't in the house, but I '11 just step to the front 
door and hark if he 's on the island!" 

When angry the JMaineite is often entertaining. The local 
grave-digger at Kennebunkport was in the habit of sealing 
down his tombstones with brimstone. This article once took a 
sharp jump in price just before he went to replenish his stock, 
and only half the usual quantity of brimstone came over the 
counter for the usual sum. The grave-digger stood looking at 
his purchase and growing redder and redder. Then he ad- 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 305 

dressed the storekeeper. "I skowl" he cried. "Ef the devil 
was as nigh as you be, he couldn't run hell a week!" 

During my vagabondage I met on one of the loneliest is- 
lands a cosmopoHtan Hghthouse keeper whose talk began at 
once to range over the whole globe. He had been in Athens 
scores of times. He had known Dom Pedro and told me how 
like a graven image the old man looked in 1870, with his beau- 
tiful white beard flowing down to his waist. He asserted that 
Stevenson was the only man who had ever really depicted the 
beach-comber of the South Seas; and that the South Ameri- 
can beach-comber had yet to be properly celebrated. 

Then he spun enthralling yarns of how, when he was a sea- 
captain liis crews would usually desert at Rio. Then he would 
visit what he winkingly called the "Spar Hotel" on the beach, 
cause the beach-combers to become drunk as lords, and then, 
at midnight, shanghai a new crew's-worth of them, row them 
to the vessel, dump them into the forecastle like so many logs, 
lock them in and set sail. Next morning the mate would un- 
lock the forecastle and shout roughly to the scare-crows to 
turn to. And the first man who began to object that he had n't 
signed on this voyage, the mate would "knock liis face in." 

Besides possessing all its rich native talent, IVIaine draws in 
summer time on the brains of the world. It is a magnet for 
distinguished people, especially for artists, who come as early 
as possible and stay until warned that if they stay another mo- 
ment longer the water pipes will freeze. The chief varieties 
of these artists are, first, painters, who love to paint the fogs, 
the protean rocks, the islands, the sea, and the mountains that 
spring so surprisingly out of it, as well as the picturesque na- 
tives and their no less picturesque harbors and lumber camps. 
Then, there are the writers, who are inspired by the advantages 
just enumerated and are kept up to high ink mark (if the ex- 
pression may be permitted) by the ozone and the electric treat- 
ment to which the Maine atmosphere subjects one ahnost daily. 
Last of all, the fiddlers adore this coast, especially the vicinity 



306 ROMAXTIC AMERICA 

of Blue Hill and Frencliman's Bays, because it is almost the 
only shore resort where the dampness of the sea air is absorbed 
by the vast surfaces of exposed rock before it can attack the 
violin or 'cello and make it sound as resonant as a piece of 
damp blotting-paper, and cause its ribs to gape like the gills of 
a fish on land, and cause it literally to lose its head at the most 
impassioned climax of the sonata. 

At Castine my open road came to an end, and I repaired 
to a certain jolly bungalow called Nowanthen, on an unfre- 
quented, lovable, primitive island called Gott's' — formerly "Lit- 
tle Placentia," or "Little Pleasance." It is a sort of American 
edition of Treasure Island. It boasts well authenticated tra- 
ditions of buried treasure, a deep, convenient, fish-crammed slit 
in the shore rocks called The Black Guzzle, and a finer view 
of IMount Desert than the people of that great island them- 
selves enjoy, because they are too near to the picture. But 
the description of a place like Gott's really requires the move- 
ment of verse. 

AVhen the pioneers sailed from the shores of France 
They called this island The Little Pleasance; 
But our fathers blotted the name, with a smile. 
And christened it, better, God's own Isle. 

AVhat turns life here to a god-like thing? — 

The rollicking runes that the ripples sing; 

Waters more blue than the Capri shoals, 

Framed by the ruddy pine-tree boles ; 

And, calm beyond the whitecaps' reel, 

The Desert Mountains' rich profile; 

The gull, that individualist, 

Questing his home tlirough the evening mist; 

The socialist ducks driving southward their wedges, 

Lured by a dream of Utopian ledges; 

To watch, from the door in the dewy cool, 

The Juncoes bathe in their saucer-like pool 

Where they putter and clutter and mutter and flutter 

And yield themselves up to an ecstasy utter ; 

The capture of cunners and cod by the muzzle 



THE OPEN ROAD IN MAINE 307 

Out of the jaws of the grim Black Guzzle; 
The delving for treasure where, one is told, 
The old French buried a kettle of gold ; 
Then to laze on the hearth of Nowanthen 
With Stevenson's tale to be read again, 
And, warmed by the glow of a milder fate. 
Dream "dead men's chests" and "pieces of eight." 
Then waken to find on a riotous shore 
The waves, with a crash and a rip and a roar, 
Flinging bodeful and wild from their desert path 
Like prophets rending their robes in wrath. 

But even the waves, when they reach God's Isle, 
Stow their black looks and begin to sraile. 
Tossing up fountains of radiant mist, 
Foam-enwoven and rainbow-kissed, 
As though they were shouting again and again: 
"Jollv's the word at Nowanthen!" 



XI 
UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 

THREE things make the island of ]\Iount Desert 
unique — its beauty, its altruism, and its variety. 
"This is the most beautiful place in the world," a 
well-known artist once assured me. "I 've been all 
round, — Italy, Greece, Syria, — but I 've never found any- 
thing to equal it." 

This beauty impresses the stranger from afar. As he coasts 
eastward along the Maine shore, thirteen mountains that seem 
to rise directly out of the sea compose themselves into three 
main masses, standing out in noble relief in the clear atmos- 
phere. The morning I first saw them the westernmost mass 
was heavy, black, and solemn. The others, divided by those 
delightful little twins, the Bubbles, were more friendly, with 
fleecy clouds stooping over them and letting through a few 
splashes of sunlight here and there to gild their peaks and 
sides. 

By the opposite approach, through Frenchman's Bay, the 
effect, though wholly different, is no less striking; for JNIount 
Desert is the one spot in the whole sweep of the Atlantic coast 
from Labrador to Mexico where the mountains go dovm to 
the sea. Sailing from this side on a day of sunshine when the 
atmosphere is softened by a little haze, one comes into view 
of a fairy-land bubbling up from the water in a heap of misty, 
delicate, softly rounded domes. Presently appear smooth, 
bright lawns sloping back from the red crags of the shore- 
hne to tree-embowered villas. And from the heights peep 
out the towers and gables of Bar Harbor's foliage-veiled cot- 

308 



11 



UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 311 

tages, many of which are so in love with the trees that one often 
has a better view of them from the water than ashore. 

By some happy chance my first experience after landing 
was of a concert by the Kneisel Quartet in one of the most 
charming spots ever dedicated in any land to the spirit of 
beauty, and certainly the fittest conceivable setting for cham- 
ber-music. In Bar Hai'bor's Building of Arts, the American 
has made the Greek temple his own and set it in natural, wild 
scenery as fair as that of an ^gean isle. In fact, this building, 
seen from the simimit of Newport JNIountain, is strongly remi- 
niscent of the temple of Theseus as it shows from the Acropolis, 
only that, with its lovely background, the modern temple 
stands out more strikingly than the ancient one, seen against 
the ugliness of modern Athens. 

The Building of Ai'ts stood open, so that we might look 
out upon sw'ard and wood and the changing lights and shadows 
on the mountains while hearing an ideal organization interpret 
Beethoven under ideal conditions. The audience seemed as 
far removed in spirit from the light mood of the usual water- 
ing-place as was the building itself. The musicians responded 
at once to that creative sympathy of their hearers which is so 
essential a factor of a successful performance anj^^vhere. And 
when one of the cottagers came forward, playing with them 
his own splendidly conceived quintet, players and audience 
seemed one in their enthusiasm. 

After the concert, while tea was being served on the lawn, it 
was a memorable thing to watch from the slopes of the grassy 
amphitheater about the building the groups of charming cos- 
tumes and the faces flushed with music and the spirit of the 
moment, outhned against the tender, creamy tones of that 
home of loveUness, framed in its turn by the strength of the 
hills. 

It seemed too good to be true that such a thing should come 
to pass in an American summer resort. The experience was 
a strange introduction indeed to a spot which I had vaguely 



312 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

expected to find a center of fashion and summer gaiety, and 
little more. But it was soon evident that this concert was 
nothing sporadic, that it actually stood for a love of beauty al- 
most Greek in its sincerity, and in harmony with the constant 
tradition of the place. For Blount Desert, the summer resort, 
was discovered about the middle of the last century by that 
famous pioneer group of American artists headed by Church, 
who thus proved themselves pioneers in more than landscape- 
painting. So the public first came to learn the spell of this 
northern landscape through the eyes of artists before they 
sought the Maine coast to enjoy it with their own eyes. 

IMany another watering-place has been discovered by the 
appreciative, only to be spoiled by the sudden inrush of pop- 
ularity and wealth. Through the boarding-house period, 
through the time of enormous wooden hotels, and into the pres- 
ent day, when, in Bar Harbor, at least, the transient guest 
has given way to the home-making cottager, the beauty-loving 
spirit of its painter-pioneers has never ceased to dominate the 
island. 

As the desire for artistic expression grew in Bar Harbor, 
and a series of chamber-concerts in private cottages developed 
musical taste, the question arose: If Germany might have its 
Bayreuth for such a hybrid thing as music-drama, why should 
not America find at least as fit a setting for the simpler, purer 
art of chamber-music? This idea was taken up by five en- 
thusiastic and devoted summer residents, and grew in scope 
until out of it there came not a building for music only, but 
the Building of Arts. For, besides concerts, dramatic per- 
formances are given both there and in the adjoining open , 
amphitheater, modeled on old Greek lines. And every sum- 
mer the building glows with a pageant of flowers which, ac- 
cording to competent critics, is of unequaled wealth and rarity. 

Tliis liorticultural exhibition is the outcome of Bar Harbor's j 
passion for the art of gardening. Due, first of all, to the I 
esthetic spirit of the place, this art has had other stimuli as 




# 



UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 315 

well. For because the island is a meeting-ground for the vege- 
tation of the arctic and the temperate zones, and because hard}-- 
herbaceous plants grow here as luxuriantly as in Switzerland, 
it is a paradise for the gardener. Nowhere else in the land 
does the procession of the flowers move from month to month 
with such legato grace, with such unbroken consistency. An- 
other boon to gardeners is the rapid recuperative power of 
nature. A certain gravel-pit near Newport Mountain, for 
example, has been almost completely reclothed in green since 
it was excavated fourteen years ago. And this quahty of 
youthful vitality keeps the wild land fresh and interesting. 

The chief impression one receives among the gardens of 
Mount Desert is that their owners have a strong feeling for 
wild nature. Tliirty years ago, when President Eliot built at 
Northeast, he said to his guest Frederick Law Ohnsted, "Olm- 
sted, you 've been here a week now and have n't told me what 
to do to my place." 

"Do to it?" cried the dean of landscape-architects. "For 
Heaven's sake, leave it alone!" 

Since that day "Leave it alone!" has become a sort of watch- 
word, and has borne fruit in a cult of wild gardens all the more 
winning in a village wealthy enough to have "improved" na- 
ture out of the island. It is an encouraging experience to find 
in America, near a palatial villa, a tangled coppice or a piece 
of rough meadow worth twelve thousand dollars an acre. 

The "return to nature" movement is equally responsible for 
the growing interest in the so-called "naturalistic" garden. 
There are many in Bar Harbor. One comes into an in'egular 
lake of lawn surrounded by wavy banks of flowers that spill 
over here and there into the grass. On one side there opens 
out a real wild waterlead, and the surrounding trees, con- 
summately composed, seem no more inentable a part of the 
picture than the gables of the house showing above them at 
the farther end. 

The formal garden would seem out of place in Bar Harbor 



316 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

if it were of tlie artificial, ostentatious kind often seen in the 
grounds of the wealthy. But here it is sometimes a little gem 
of landscape-architecture at once formal and natural, breaking 
perhajjs into wildness and running down to the rugged shore, 
or placed for a surprise next to a sweep of rocky meadow, or 
held in the heart of a tangled thicket, like a polished nut inside 
its bur. While the purpose of this formalism is evidently to 
intensify by contrast the wild natiu'alness of the place, it has 
also resulted in lending the formal gardens here an unusual 
vividness and charm. 

Certain vignettes persist in mj^ memory, such as a Japanese 
bronze dragon, seen from above, writhing amid floral color 
harmonies that modulate subtly toward a pergola smothered 
in scarlet woodbine. Another is of a brook dammed into a 
charming wood-girdled pond into which runs a smaller stream, 
musically inclined, overarched by high-stepping miniature 
bridges, guarded by tiny fences of tied bamboo, and with the 
stone shrines and the gnarled dwarf trees of Japan standing 
here and there. Up by a straw-thatched j^agoda that is ar- 
tisticallj' held together with ropes, a brazen Buddha presides 
on a ledge of rocks, and a single fern issues from a cranny 
beneath, in the accepted Jajjanese manner. Between the tree- 
trunks one spies over the streamlet a jut of red crag, a sheet 
of blue-gray ocean, and a distant peak that one feels must be 
Fujiyama. 

The existence of the largest and most formal of Bar Har- 
bor's gardens might be unsuspected from the steps of its villa. 
You adventure through a narrow, winding way in a wild copse, 
and come first upon a spread of velvety turf; then suddenly, 
beyond a round plot of snapdragon and a sun-dial, you dis- 
cover a small marble fountain surrounded by phlox and helio- 
trope, while the whole is backed by a semi-circular bed of white 
snapdragon and a large, crescent loggia covered with vines. 

But this is merely looking across the transept of the chapel 
of flowers. You move up the nave and return for the full 



UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 317 

effect. Over the side walls, studded w-ith dwarf evergreens, 
the tree-columns of the inclosing wood look down on a dense 
fringe of liigh-growing flowers, colored as richly and delicately 
as aisle-windows of old stained glass. The central space is 
dedicated to a few formal trees and shrine-hke vases of bloom, 
and beyond them two marble lions preside over the approach 
to the lofty choir, a loggia not too vine-clad to allow from 
below it a view of Newport jMountain. 

The beautj^ of the outlook from those fortunate lofty ve- 
randas that command the sea has a particularly romantic 
quality. From the northwestern part of Bar Harbor, where 
the houses are as exquisitely conformed to the configuration 
of their steep grounds as Rhenish castles, one may look out 
over a slope of great, rough evergreens to the harbor filled with 
vivacious pleasure-craft. Bar Island and the Little Porcupine 
coming dreamily out of the haze as in a canvas by Boeeklin, 
and, beyond, the mainland faintly penciled. 

Or passing down the Ocean Drive, which can be compared 
only to that enchanted waj' winding above the INIeditcrranean 
from Amalti to Sorrento, one discovers from the heights of 
Seal Harbor as charming a group of pleasure-boats and a 
more interesting panorama of islands than are to be seen from 
Bar Harbor, Avith only the distant coast-line lacking to make 
this the crowning view of aU. One evening here I shall not 
soon forget. It was the celebration of Seal Harbor's cen- 
tenary. Venice with its musical gondolas never offered a more 
engaging pageant than that sweep of illumined water, girdled 
by lanterned villas. The yachts, great and small, outlined 
themselves in colored fires and bristled with pinwheels and 
Roman candles. Rockets gushed up in concert from both 
shores meeting in a Gothic arch above the mosquito squadron 
that wound like a phosphorescent sea-serpent in and out of the 
shipping. Among the rocks the groundswell exploded its pe- 
riodical salute. And at the height of the festivities there came 
a glimmer and a flicker among the branches of Ox Hill and a 



318 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

great harvest moon sailed up to poise itself over the scene. 

There is not space enough to touch on the charm of North- 
east Harbor and Southwest Harbor nestling by the mouth of 
Somes Sound, our only authentic Norwegian fjord. Tradi- 
tion declares that the stranger, no matter where he first may 
land on Mount Desert, forever after prefers that particular 
spot, returns to it every season and hotly champions its claims 
against all rivals. 

Perhaps it is owing to the accident of having found Seal 
Harbor first that it is to me the most satisfying of the settle- 
ments. In its central location it can easily draw on all the 
special advantages of its neighbors. It is the most convenient 
base for the lover of mountain-climbing; its coast is more 
rugged. It commands a more fascinating group of islands, 
and has none of that city flavor which is beginning to be felt 
at Bar Harbor. It — but, there, this is exactly the sort of talk 
that any ISIount Deserter will give you by the hour about his 
favorite harbor. Woe betide the rash wTiter who should pre- 
sume to decide which of the harbors is the most beautiful. As 
for me, I had as lief decide between Chartres Cathedral, the 
Winged Victory, Leonardo's Last Supper, and the Seventh 
Symphony. 

Not alone beauty and a spirit of beauty, but a unique spirit 
of altruism as well has helloed to unify the people of Mount 
Desert, much as the recession of the waters once unified a 
group of storm-swept mountain peaks nine or ten leagues out 
at sea into this one lovely island. 

Unlike many summer colonists, the INIount Deserters do not 
spend much on self and little pro bono jmhlico. For the island 
is rich in public-spirited institutions and organizations. Even 
the claims of the distant future are not neglected. A far- 
seeing group of summer residents have formed a committee 
known as the Trustees of Public Reservations for Hancock 
County, and have gradually acquired valuable lands, includ- 
ing several mountain peaks and ponds, as perpetual public 



UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 321 

reservations. It is hoped in the end to encircle each of the 
harbors from the rear with a zone of pubhc land, and to forest 
the whole island on a scientific basis. 

At Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor the summer resi- 
dents, in proportion to their numbers, are quite as active in the 
pubhc interest as their Bar Harbor friends. And all work 
together efficiently. For example, the Maine Sea Coast jNIis- 
sion, supported by IMount Desert, has for seven years been giv- 
ing the folk of the neighboring islands the sort of assistance, 
mental, physical, and spiritual, that Dr. Grenfell brings to the 
fisherfolk of Labrador. And Captain !Macdonald, minister 
and navigator, may stand on the summit of Green INIoun- 
tain and see half of his hundred-mile-long parish of isle-studded 
coast. Some of his islands are uncharted, without laws, and 
beyond the pale of any government; yet not beyond the reach 
of the larger island's good-will. 

Not long ago a winter resident of Bar Harbor, a house- 
painter working at one of the cottages, was found studying a 
photograph of an old picture, and presently he asked the mis- 
tress of the house whether it was a Perugino or a Raphael. 
The lady grew interested, and found, after some conversation, 
that the house-painter and his wife had been making a serious 
studj' of Italian art for five years. Further inquiry revealed 
that association with the summer people and with the artists who 
had built the cottages had not only trained up a body of ex- 
ceptionally skilled artisans, but had also roused among the 
winter residents a vigorous appetite for artistic knowledge. 
In a community so altruistic an arts and crafts movement nat- 
urally followed, and now, under the direction of a well-known 
sculptor, a sort of local William INIorris, the residents are 
learning how to cast beautiful garden decorations in cement, 
to model, to hammer iron, to dye fabrics, to make Italian point- 
lace, and so on. 

When one realizes that INIount Desert is still in its infancy 
as a summer resort, and realizes its brilliant possibilities and 



322 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

the determined public spirit of the men who have set out to 
fulfil them, one cannot avoid the conclusion that this region 
is destined to be one of the important recreation centers of 
America. For the island is already as unique in its variety 
as it is in beauty and altruism. It is a world in httle. Each 
settlement has managed to keep its own strong individuality 
intact. It is onlj' at the height of the summer that the pre- 
vailing note of Bar Harbor is the monotonous note given by 
the so-called "smart set." To those whose ideas of this resort 
have been gathered from hearsay and the newspapers, its sub- 
dued refinement of tone, its lack of "yellow streaks," vnW come 
as a surprise. "There 's little heavj' drinking or gambling 
here," Dr. Weir ISIitcheU remarked, "and less of the Newport 
ostentation. It is more like the dear old Newport I used to 
know in the days of Agassiz." Both before and after the 
butterfly season, INIount Desert is a quiet, delightful place, 
with an atmosphere favorable to the arts and even to philos- 
ophy. It is the home of a colony of distinguished writers and 
other artists. In fact, the whole island fairly teems with tem- 
perament and intellect. 

"Everybodj' comes to JNIount Desert, and you can do any- 
thing here," an enthusiastic poet exclaimed not long ago. 

So far as pleasure is concerned, he was not far wrong about 
the possibility of doing anything; for the island's resources are 
ample enough to provide fresh recreation for almost every day 
of the season. The saihng is superb. The harbors, filled with 
varied craft, from the tiniest launch to the ocean-going j'acht, 
are often visited bj^ the larger yacht-clubs on their cruises, and 
a squadron of war-ships may sometimes be seen riding at 
anchor in the lee of the Porcupines. 

]\Iount Desert seems to do everything well. Though the 
climate is usually rather cool for comfortable ocean bathing, 
there are two swimming-pools where the water is warmed in 
the sun over several tides. Every morning in the elaborate 
house of the Bar Harbor Swimming-Club a part of the Bos- 



UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 325 

ton Symphony Orchestra plays a class of music so excellent 
«.a .t would be declared "impossible" at most summer resorts 
Outside, about the tennis-courts, the gaily colored crowd of 
young people, with their brilliance and animation, take one 
back to Smollett s word-pictures of the season at Bath. Here 
one may often see tennis of a quality seldom found outside of 
the important tournaments. Good tennis clubs exist at three 
ot the harbors, and interesting golf-links at two 

There is scarcely any end to the variety of local recreations. 
One may nde and drive on superb mountain roads high over 
the sea. No fewer than four places, including Jordan Pond 
and Somesville, are the objective points of luncheons and din- 
ner-parties, with wholesome and simple food, of which the 
ptece deremtance is fried chicken with corn and sweet pota- 
toes, and nothing stronger to di-ink than ginger-ale. Picnics 
are popular on the Cranberry Islands, on the rocky beach 
amphitheaters of Baker's and Gott's, near the high surf from 
the open sea, among the thousand screaming gulls of the re- 
markable Duck Islands, or inland in the course of mountain- 
ckmbs. One may haul two dozen varieties of flapping, wriff- 
ghng creatures out of the sea with a hand-hne. One may float 
in a canoe on one of the island lakes and entice trout and land- 
locked sahnon with a four-ounce rod and a leaderful of dainty 
flies. •' 

There are wfld-fowl to shoot in season. And one has an 
occasional glimpse of larger game. A few summers ago a 
couple of moose, pursuing a hereditarj^ tradition, swam from 
the mainland, a distance of nine miles, and landed in Bar Har- 
bor, near the mouth of Duck Brook. One of them sauntered 
about an elaborate formal garden, went through a tennis-net, 
scared the sen^ants, and made off toward Young's .Alountain,' 
carrying everj-tliing before him. In the old days big game in' 
large numbers used to take tliis trip to escape the aunual hunt. 
And the Indians followed them over, and continued to do so 
as long as they were allowed. 



326 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

Jklount Desert, being one of the most ancient regions in the 
world, has a special charm for the geologist. For the moun- 
tains were formed not by foldings of the earth's crust, but by 
having their valleys gouged out by the icy power-shovels of 
the glacial period. "This range," as Professor Davis writes, 
"is one of the most stubborn survivors of the ancient high- 

"" The island is the joy of the botanist, too, and of all seekers 
after hidden treasure. About the year 1840 a heap of old 
French coin and a pot of gold were found at different places 
not far from Castine, on the neighboring mainland. This, 
taken with the tale of the kettle of money on Gott's, and a 
tradition that Captain Kidd's real cache was at INIount Desert, 
brought on an epidemic of treasure-hunting which has never 
wholly died out. The spirit of the quest still remains, and for 
most of us deepens the caU of the island. 

But the sure way to find the greatest treasure of all is to 
abandon yourself to the chief recreation of ISIount Desert and 
climb for it along one of the many mountain trails. That 
critic would be brave indeed who dared settle on the most re- 
warding path and peak, for these are rivals as dear as the 
harbors themselves. Green is the highest mountain, and from 
its more than fifteen hundred feet one has the most compre- 
hensive sweep of range and lake-filled valley, of encirchng sea 
and mainland, with old Katahdin looming on the horizon it 
the day be clear. One even finds on its southern slope the 
glamour of legend in a tradition that the famous sea-serpent, 
which made its summer home in Eagle Lake and fattened on 
the lambs of the neighboring farm, was overtaken there by a 
forest fire and left for souvenirs forty joints of his backbone, 
each a foot thick. In proof whereof the scene of the episode 
is known to this day as Great Snake Flat. 

Farther down the mountain, past a place called the Old 
Leopard, one reaches the Pot Holes, which were worn deep 
into the bed-rock by glacial and chemical action. Two par- 



I 1 



UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 829 

ticular pairs of twin holes so resemble two gigantic footprints 
that if Europe possessed them they would by this time be 
incrusted with legends of how the giant who lurked in Feather- 
bed Hollow pursued the beautiful princess of Resting Rock, 
and how she was saved by the fairy of Eagle's Crag, who, 
with a wave of her magic wand, embedded liis great feet in the 
rock, where they slowly moldered away, but left their marks 
forever. 

After a hard day's climb, I know of no more charming 
mountain walk tlian the gentle descent from here to the Black 
Woods. One goes delicately on moss or pine-needles, on clean 
white gravel or turf, or the smooth bed rock. As in a park, 
rare varieties of trees border the way, and one comes to many 
a natural clearing, with its vistas of mountain and sea. More 
than any other American spot this south ridge brings back to 
me the atmosphere of the Lake Country immortalized by 
Wordsworth. There are, however, certain drawbacks to 
Green. The carriage-road takes something from its charm. 
It is too far inland to give that sense of hanging over the sea 
which makes the ascent of Newport memorable, and one misses 
the noble outline of Green itself, which is a feature of the views 
from Pemetic and Sargent. 

In these mountains one is forever coming upon original 
effects, hke the natural stone sidewalk up Jordan called the 
Bluffs, the fairy theater on Pemetic, the sacred grove between 
Newport and Pickett, or the witchery of Jordan Brook, an- 
other such little stream as Stevenson immortalized in "Prince 
Otto." The fairy theater is molded out of the living rock, 
and is no more than six feet across. Here, when the moon 
rides high, the Little People (whose real home, fable declares, 
is over on Brown ^Mountain) hold their outdoor plays. There 
is a royal box for the king and even a specially private one with 
canopy for the modest author. One enters the sacred grove 
all at once on the slippery descent to the Gorge. The bril- 
liance of noon is lowered in a breath to twilight. Notliing is 



330 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

visible but the boles of fir and spruce, bearing their dense 
canopy above an immaculate forest flooring of browTi needles. 
But there is a magic in that sudden transformation that fills 
one, as no other grove I know, with the spirit of the Greek 
religion. 

There is space here for only a hint of the variety of the 
paths. One of the most romantic of them picks its way for 
half a mile beneath the crumbhng face of Cadillac Cliffs. 
Under the firs, in the shadow of great, mossy red boulders, 
within sound of the surf of Thunder Hole, a needle-carpeted 
trail leads up craggy, fern-covered stairways to the country of 
kobolds and pixies and all sorts of beneficent spirits of earth 
and air. 

On Bracy Point, at Seal Harbor, near the rock called old 
Meenahga, which ISIr. Howells once likened to an old Indian 
with a tuft of red feathers and white ear-rings — near old 
Meenahga is a wonderful little fir grove which would be a fit 
stage for one of the dream-dramas of Maeterlinck, with its ro- 
mantic noondaj^ moonlight, as it were, that should be neighbor 
to 

"magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 

And from its verge, at dusk, beyond a rock-bound cove of 
racing surf, one sees darkly silhouetted against the sunset glow 
a house akin to some hoary Romanesque castle on guard above 
an Old World river. 

But one must end somewhere, when scores of rival memories 
clamor for notice. This island is such a varied thing that it 
seems as if composed by a poet fond of antithesis, who had 
determined to display his whole rejjertory of effects in a single 
effort. No one has described this range of contrasts more 
clearly than Clara Barnes Martin described it more than thirty 
years ago : 

Bleak mountain-side and sunny nook in sheltered cove ; frowning preci- 
pice and gentle smiling meadow; broad, heaving ocean and placid mountain 



UNIQUE MOUNT DESERT 331 

lake; clashing sea-foam and glistening trout brook; the deep thunder of tlie 
ground-swell, and the solemn stillness of the mountain gorge; the impetuous 
rush and splash of the surf and the musical cadence of far-off waterfalls, 
all mingle and blend in the memory of this wonderland. 

The air offers contrasts as wide as do the water and the land. 
Marion Crawford would not admit this element of variety, but 
unfairly complained, in "Love in Idleness," that earth, sky, 
and water were "hard, bright, and cold"; that the picture had 
neither depth nor "atmosphere." Even if this were so, it 
should offer no reasonable ground for complaint. That vet- 
eran traveler Ambassador Bryce says, indeed, that he prefers 
the clear, sharp days, when the northern character of the island 
is more boldly defined, to the misty, romantic effects, when 
its rounded, gentle mountains remind one more of the JNIediter- 
ranean. There is no denying that the clear, sharp October 
of JNIount Desert has a sjjecial charm. For then, in all rare 
reds from orange to ruby and from pink to crimson, the blue- 
berry bushes burst into their autumnal glory high on the moun- 
tains, mellowed by the waning remnant of their more 
conservative leaves. One of the island's characteristic effects 
comes when the sun abruptly deluges a whole mountain peak, 
shining through the blueberry clumps in a riot of color, intensi- 
fied by the solid effects of the more sober hard-wood foliage 
below, by the darks of the stunted woodline evergreens, and 
the varied blues of the distant sea. It is on such days as these 
that one most appreciates the bracing, crystalline air, the bold, 
vigorous colors, the sharp outlines that have, I fear, come to 
be identified far too rigidly with this island. 

For there is another side to the story. Mount Desert is not 
pure Norway: it is Norway and Italy combined. Days come 
when the atmosphere, in the words of a landscape-painter who 
knows it well, "has infinite color and softness — has a spongj' 
and velvety feeling to your fingers." (Often it is quite too 
spongy and velvety, for the island is notorious for its fogs.) 
Marion Crawford was sadlv mistaken. There is atmosphere 



332 ROMANTIC AMERICA 

at Mount Desert; only one must watch and be patient. As 
for me, I prefer my landscape not fully revealed in a brilliant 
light, but slightly veiled in a film of suggestion, where more is 
meant than meets the eye. And it was an experience worth 
months of waiting to stand on the summit of Sargent one Sep- 
tember afternoon, breathing in the ozone of Scandinavia while 
feasting my eyes on a vision filled with the dreamy poetry of 
the South. 

I have never, from any high place in the Old World seen 
a sight comparable in its melting beauty to that first glimpse. 
The hard, bold northern landscape had onlj' needed an hour 
of sunlight and a little soft haze to become tender, mystical, 
almost JNIediterranean in quality. Northeastward the Burnt 
Bubble cut into the irregular blue-gray of Eagle Lake. 
Above it the spurs of Green INIountain disclosed the lavender 
of the yacht-studded sea beyond Bar Harbor. On the far 
mainland gleamed scattered white settlements, magnified in 
the uncertain atmosj^here into strange, far-off cities of another 
clime. And behind them rose, in a bulwark, the mysterious 
mainland peaks. 

There was something inexpressibly ajipealing in such a gra- 
cious mood of this austere land of the Desert mountains. But 
as the eye ranged north and west over the groups of islands at 
the head of Somes Sound, the scene became by imperceptible 
degrees bolder and more brilliant, until at length the western 
sun, striking the surface of the Sound into a sheet of burnished 
steel, lowered its light gradually in Echo Lake and Long Lake, 
until it turned to reddish gold far out upon the waters of Blue 
Hill Bay. And immediately to the south this vision of pano- 
plied splendor was presided over by mountains rising tier on 
tier, their loftiest peak waving a banner of smoky cloud, like 
some benign Vesuvius of the New World. 

THE END 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Allegheny City, Penn., 87 



B 



Bar Harbor, Me., 311-322 

Barnstable, Mass., 3 

Bath, Me., 291 

Belfast, Me., 301 

Blast of steel works, seen from Mt. 

Washington, Pittsburgh, 77, 78 
Boothbay Harbor, Me., 292 
Brandon estate on the James River, 43- 

52 
Bruton Parish cliurch, Williamsburg, 

Va., 59, 62 
BjTd family and the Westover estate of 

Virginia, 43-49, 51 



California missions: 
Carmelo: 

Before restoration, 168 
Date of founding, 162 
Founder, Junipero Serra, 162, 16S 
Interior as Stevenson saw it, 163 
Oldest but one of missions, 162 
Dolores, 162 
Pala, 174 

San Buenaventura, 186, 189 
San Diego, first mission at, 165, 166, 

169, 171 
San Fernando, 180. 185 
San Gabriel, 168, 182, 185 
San Juan Bautista, 162 
San Juan Capistrano, 174—182 
San Luis Rev, 169, 170, 1T3, 175, 180 
Santa Barbara, 184, 186-188 
Serra, Junipero, founder, 162-166 
Camden, Me., 298-301 
Cape Cod. 3-32 
Carmelo Mission in California, 161-166. 

168. 
Castine, Me., 296, 301-303 
Chatham, Mass., 3 
Churches: 
Bruton Parish, William-sburg, Va., 59, 

62 
First American. Jamestown. Va., 62 
Provincetown, Mass.. 12 
Coffin-plates. Framed, in the New Eng- 
land parlor. 6 
Colorado River, 237-239 

335 



Constitution, First written. Rival claims 
of Provincetown and Jamestown, 
12, 58 

Creole city of New Orleans, 249-277 



D 



Dune county of Provincetown, Mass., 
18-26 



Estates, Colonial, on the James River, 
37-52 



Gott's Island, Me., 306, 307 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado: 

Angel's Gate, 242 

Battleship. 237 

Bright Angel Trail, 237, 239 

Buddha. 237 

City of temples, 227 

Coconino Forest, 247 

Colorado River, 237-239 

Colors, 226, 227, 235 

Dana Butte, 239 

Descent into the canyon, 236 

Drydock, 237 

El Tovar, 246 

First views, 225, 226 

Geology, 235, 236 

Grand "view, 245 

Grand View Trail, 242 

Hermit Trail. 240 

Hopi Point, 231, 234, 239 

Horn Creek, 240 

Horseshoe Mesa, 242, 245 

Horus Temple, 239 

Impressions on tourists, 246, 247 
Impressiveness. 248 

Interesting most, when shadows are 

long, 231 
Isis, 228, 239 
Jacob's Ladder, 237 
Lone Tree canyon, 242 
Mammoth Cave, 242 
Maricopa, 228 
Mists in the canyon, 243 
Nightfall seen from Hopi Point, 231, 

234 
Nomenclature, 240 
Origin, 232, 235 
Painted Desert, 245, 246 
Pima Point, 248 



336 



INDEX 



Grand Canj'on of the Colorado — cont'd. 

Rift in the walls, 32i 

Kim Road, 2i1 

Seeing from above, 228 

Shiva, 239 

Storm passing, 229 

Sunset glow, 234 

Tonto Trail, 239, 241, 246 

Tower of Set, 239 

Trip down the river, 239-241 

Trip up the river, 241-246 

Vegetation as one descends, 236 
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 139, 

156-159 
Graveyard epitaphs in Maine, 284, 297 

H 

Harwich, Mass., 3 

Holly tree of Virginia, 38, 43 

Hot Springs of Yellowstone Park, 136- 

138 
House, Oldest In America, continuously 

occupied, 49 
Hyannis, Mass., 3 



James River, Trip down, 33-37 
Jamestown Island : 

Church, first in America, the sail-cloth 
service, 62, 68 

Historical notes, 52, 55 

"Improvers" and their desecration, 56 

Powder magazine, 63 

View of, 53 



K 
Kennebunkport, Me., 288 



Law school, First American, in Williams- 
burg, Va., 61 

Lincoln, Abraham, Tradition concerning 
his visit to a New Orleans slave 
market, 268, 276 

Lincoln farm near Mammoth Cave, 126 

Long Beach, Me. 288 

M 
Maine: 

Bar Harbor, 311-322 

Bath, 291 

Belfast, 301 

Boothbay Harbor, 293 

Camden, 298-301 

Casco Bar. 291 

Castine, 296, 301-303 

Coast, character of, 280, 381, 283 

Gott's Island, 300, 307 

Graveyard cjiitaphs, 284, 297 

Kenneliunkport, 288 

Long Beach, 288 

Monhegan Island, 292, 293, 296 



Maine — cont'd. 

Mount Desert Island, 308-332 

Muscongus Island. 293, 294 

Nowanthen bungalow on Gott's Island, 
306 

Open road in, 279-307 

Original characters, 302-305 

Sign-board belt, 294, 297, 298 

Vagabond spirit necessary to under- 
stand, 283 

Wears well, 279 

York, 284-288 
Mammoth Cave: 

Acute Angle, 117 

Audubon Avenue, 113 

Bandits' Hall, 111 

Booth's Amphitheater, 113 

Bottomless Pit, 104 

Bridal Altar, 114 

Cascade Hall, 127 

Chief City, 122, 123 

Cleveland's Cabinet, 128 

Corkscrew Passage, 111 

Dante's Gateway, 103 

Echo Chamber, 104 

Echo River, 108, 110, 111 

Elizabeth's Dome, 125 

Entrance, 102, 105 

Fairy Grotto, 126 

Fat Man's Misery, 107 

Floating Cloud Room, 121 

Giant's Coffin, 117 

Gorin's Dome, 103 

Gothic Avenue, 104, 114 

Grand Portal, 126 

Guide, Appearance of, 102 

G\'psum flower gardens, 127 

Hotel, "Atmosphere of," 101 

Leopard's Rug, 103 

Mammoth Dome, 108, 111, 115 

Martha Washington, 117 

Minerva's Dome, 103, 117 

Minnehaha Falls, 127 

Nationalizing of the Cave and Lin- 
coln's farm, 127 

Odd Fellows' Hall, 107 

Ole Bull's Concert Hall, 127 

OUve's Bower, 113 

Post Oak Pillar, 114 

Procter's Arcade, 120 

Railway line from Glasgow Junction 
to Cave, 100 

Rainbow Walls, 128 

Saltpeter manufacture during war of 
1812, 112 

Samson's Pillar, 121 

Serpent Hall, 127 

Shelbv's Dome, 104 

Side-Saddle Pit, 103 

Snow Chamber, 121 

Star Chamber, 117-119, 130 

Stevenson's Lost River, 103 

St^TC River, 107 

Suicide Rock, 128 



INDEX 



337 



Mammoth cave — confd. 
Temperature constant, 10;J 
Trip one, 103 
Trip two, lli3 
Trij) three, 130 
Trip four, 137 
Ultima Thule, 135 
Unknown parts explored, 131-133 
Vale of Diamonds, 138 
Violet City, 125 
WalhaUa, 135, 126 
Water Clock, 117 
Wrights' Rotunda, 121 
Mardi Gras of New Orleans, 349-253 
Monhegan Island, Me., 392, 393, 396 
Monterey, Cal., the Carmelo Mission, 161- 

166, 168 
Mount Desert Island: 
Air, 331 
Bar Harbor: 

Building of Arts, 311, 312 
Gardens, 312, 315-317 
Ocean Drive, 299, 317 
Painter pioneers, 312 
Prevailing note, 323 
Showing the bar, 310 
Beauty, 308 

Chffs near Ocean Drive, 289 
Game. 335 

Gardens, 313, 315-317 
Geology, 336 

Green and Dry Mountains, 313 
Headland, 386 
Jordan Mountain, 333 
Jordan Pond, 337 
Mountain trails, 336-330 
Northeast Harbor, 318, 331 
Norway and Italy combined, 331 
Public-spirited organizations, 318, 321 
Resources of the Island, 322, 335 
Seal Harbor, 317, 318, 321 
Southwest Harbor, 318 
Spirit of altruism, 318, 331 
View from Cranberry Island, 320 
View from summit of Sargent, 332 
Muscongus Island, Me., 293, 294 

N 

New Orleans: 

Beauregard Park, 268 
Bienville, founder of the city, 267 
Blacksmith shop. Notorious, 367 
Carondelet Canal, 262 
Cemeteries, 271-374 
Church of St. Rooh, 275 
Congo Square, 268 
Courtyards, 256. 263 
Creole characteristics, 253-357 
Creole kitchen, 266 
Creole proverbs. 350, 353. 354 
Dancing in Congo Square. 369 
Haunted House and Mme. Lalaurie, 
264 



New Orleans — cont'd. 
Heart of the city, 267 
Horrors of the past, 264 
Hotel Royal and surroundings, 362 
Jackson Scjuare, 267 
Levee, 274-277 
Little Paris, 357 
Mardi Gras, 349-353 
Market, French, 369 
Napoleon's house, 268 
Old French Quarter, 257-271 
Physical appearance, 257, 358 
Picayune Tier, 274, 275 
St. Roch, Miracle-working shrine of, 

275 
Signs, 363, 263 
Slave market, 268 
Street Ufa in Old French Quarter, 258, 

261 
Street names, 263 
Tombs and "ovens," 271-274 
Toulouse Street, 251, 262 
Voodooism, 271 



Petersburg, Va., Founded liv Colonel 

William Byrd, 44 
Phi Beta Kappa Society founded by 

William and Mary College, 65 
Pilgrim Memorial Monument, Province- 
town, Mass, 12, 13 
Pittsburgh, Pa.: 
Allegheny City, 87 
Anderson Street bridge, Views from, 

83, 84 
Blast of steel works viewed from Mt. 

Washington, 77 
Carnegie Institute. 90 
Christmas tree. City as, 76 
Churches, 90 

City of beautiful smoke, 71 
Cliff dwellings, 86 
Faces of the average citizens, 97 
Geography, 75 
Hill, The] 75. 77 
Junction Hollow, 93 
Mt. Washington, Best view of city 

from, 75-78 
New kind of licauty. 73 
Nickname "Hell with the lid off," 72 
Nunnery Hill, 84, 88 
Peninsula and the skycrapers, 74, 79 
Picturesque side, 71-78 
River life and views, 83-97 
St. Anthony's Chapel and the collection 

of relics, 89 
St. Mary's graveyard, 88 
Smokescope, 71-78 
Soho. 89 

Steel plant. Visit to, 93-99 
Street names, Peculiar, 79, 91 
Plantations on the James River, 37-53 
Plymouth, Mass., 3 



338 



INDEX 



Portuguese of Provincetown, Mass., 4-6, 

n, 17, 27-29 
Provincetown, Mass. : 
Architecture, i, 12 
Bellamy, the pirate, Tale of, 21, 23 
Christmas week among the Portuguese, 

17 
Church by Sir Christopher Wren, 10, 13 
Commercial Street: 

At its best after snowstorm, 7 

Bits of Portugal, 4 

Houses on, 8 

Origin, 7 

Portuguese apects, 4, 5 

View of, 10 

Views from, 8, 11 
Comparison with Williamsburg, Va., 58 
Constitution, First written, Iiy Pil- 

grim.s, 13 
Decorations of front yards, 7 
Drawing of the weirs by the fishermen, 

28, 31, 33 
Dune country, 18-26 
Eno's Fish JIarket Wharf, 36 
Festival of the Nativity celebrated by 

the Portuguese, 17 
Fisher folk, 27-33 
Foundations and the Vikings, 11, 13 
Girl of, how recognized, 8 
Heart of Cape Cod, 3 
Houses on Commercial Street, 4, 8 
Interior of houses. Typical, 6 
Lanes, 11, 29 
Likened to Tyrolese village of Klau- 

sen, 4 
Moving of town across the harbor, 7 
My.stery about the place, 17 
People, Characteristics of, 13-16 
Pilgrim Memorial Monument, 12, 13 
Plank walk, 8 
Portuguese inhabitants, 4-6, 11, 17, 

37-39 
Puritan descendents, 5 
"Risin", the slope of the beach, 27, 29 
Sand dunes, 18-26 
Signs, 16 

Size of town, 3, 4 
Soil from South America, 8 
Thoreau quoted, 35 
Town crier, 15 

Water-side of the town, 26-32 
Wharves, 19, 26, 27, 29 



R 



Redwood trees of California, 193 
Richmond, Va., 33, 44 



San Diego, the cradle of California, 

Mission at, 165, 166, 169, 171 
San Gabriel Mission, 168, 183, 185 
San Juan Capistrano Mission, 174-182 



San Luis Rey Mission, 169, 170, 173, 175, 
180 

Sand dunes of Provincetown, Mass., 18- 
36 

Sandwich, Mass., 3 

Santa Barbara Mission, 184, 186-188 

Sequoias of California, 193 

Serra, Junipero, founder of the Califor- 
nia missions, 163-166 

Shirley estate on the James River, Vir- 
ginia, 36, 37-40 

Sign-board belt of Maine, 394, 397, 298 

Smokescope of Pittsburgh, 71-78 

Steel blast seen from Mt. Washington, 
Pittsburgh, 77, 78 

Steel plant at Pittsburgh, Visit to, 93-98 



Theater, First in America, at Williams- 
burg, Va., 61 
Town crier of Provincetown, Mass., 15 
Truro, Mass., 3 



Virginia: 

Brandon estate, 48-53 

Bvrd familv and the Westover estate, 

43-49, 51 
Ducking-Stool Point, 34 
Estates, Oldest, on the James River, 

37-53 
Holly trees, 38, 43 
Jamestown Island, 53-57, 63 
Language and customs, 34, 37 
Shirley estate, 36, 37-10 
Spell 'of, 33 
Tidewater Virginia a kind of sylvan 

Venice, 33 
Westover estate, 41, 43-49 
Williamsburg, 53, 57-70 

W 

Washington, George, Peale portrait of, 
at Shirley, Virginia, 39 

Wellfleet, Mass.', 3 

Westover estate in Virginia, 41, 43-49 

William and Mary College, 65 

Williamsburg, Va.: 

Blackbeard tlie Pirate, 65 
Church, Bruton Parish. 59, 63 
Comparison with Provincetown, Mass., 

58 
Duke of Gloucester Street, 58, 59 
Flowers, tradition of the Scotch 

broom, 57 
Gibbie Gault, the schoolmistress, 66 
Historical opulence, 57 
Law school. First American, 61 
Lord Dunmore's wine cellar, 58 
"Maker of the Union," 57 
Nancy Craig and her peculiarity, 69 



INDEX 



339 



Williamsburg, Ya. — cont'd. 
Palace Green, 58, 61 
Powder Horn, the revolutionary mag- 
azine, 61 
Theater, First in America, 61 
William and Mary College, 65 



Yarmouth, Mass., 3 
Yellowstone Park: 

Algae in the outlet of the springs, 147 

Angel Terrace, 137 

Beauty Spring, 1-17 

Castle Geyser, 1+7 

CasUe Well, U7 

Chinaman Geyser, 146 

Curiosity shop and its line of curios, 
i:J4ll36 

Daisy Geyser, 148 

Devil's Frying Pan. 141 

Devil's Kitchen, 138 

Emerald Pool, 139, 148 

Firchole River, 152 

Fishing in Firehole River. 152 

Geysers, 141-153 

Golden Gate, 138 

Grand Canyon, 139, 156-159 

Grotto Geyser, 148 

Hymen Terrace, 136 

Jupiter Terrace, 137 

McCartney's Cave, 138 

Mammoth Hot Springs, 136-138 

Mammoth Paint Pots, 145 

Mud Geyser, 156 

Old Faithful Geyser, 144, 151 

Old Faithful Inn, 145 

Pelicans of Yellowstone Lake, 155 

Rainbow Pool, 148 

Roaring Mountain, 141 

Silver Gate, 138 

Stygian Cave, 138 

Sunset Lake, 148 

Yellowstone Falls, 149 



Yellowstone Park — confd. 

Yellowstone Lake, 152-155 
York, Me., 284-288 
Yosemite Valley: 

Approach, The best, 192. 195 

Artist's Point, View from, 195, 219 

Bridal Veil, 195, 200, 211, 219 

Camp Curry, 202-205, 221 

Cathedral Hocks, 195, 200 

Cloud's Rest, 195. 205, 210, 216-219 

Color-scheme, 199 

Discovery in 1851. 196 

EI Capitan, "noblest of the crags of 
earth," 195. 199, 210. 219 

El Portal approach not the best. 192 

Epitome of marvels of American West, 
196 

Floods of spring, 200 

Glacier Point, 210. 218 

Half Dome. 195, 198, 205, 206, 209, 219 

Illilouette Falls, 210, 211 

Inspiration Point, 195, 210, 218 

Introduction to the valley, 195 

Mirror Lake, 206, 209 

Moonlight in the valley, 215, 216 

Mount Hoffman, 202, "218 

Nevada Falls, 210, 211 

North dome. 195. 205. 209 

Origin. 196. 199. 202 

Redwood trees at Wawona, 192 

Ribbon Falls, 195 

Royal Arches, 206, 213 

Sentinel Rock, 200 

Sierra Point, 210, 211 

Sunrises in Jlirror Lake, 209 

Three Brothers, 200 

Three Graces, 200 

Tissiack, 205, 206 

Upper Valley, Best view of, 205 

Vernal Falls, 210, 211 

AValls of the valley, 193 

Washington's Column, 205 

Yosemite Falls, 201. 208, 211 

Yosemite Point, 213 



